Adam Thierer has posted a thoughtful review of the Future of the Internet. He picks up on something that others have mentioned that I don’t realize I appear to suggest: that my distinction between sterile and generative technologies appears to be too much of a dichotomy, and that I think that only generative technologies are good ones.
I don’t mind sterile technologies in principle — I like the idea of taking the rough-hewn innovations that spring from the Internet and packaging them into cleaner, more reliable forms. I love my TiVo. (Indeed, that used to be the first sentence of the book. Then I went with the iPhone.) I even appreciate that sterile technologies can come about without having to emulate the products of generative ones — not every toaster comes from nerds experimenting with heating elements.
My worry, though, is that we’ll lose a sense of equilibrium between the generative and sterile spheres, and that the emergence of contingently generative technologies — platforms that are open to third party innovation at first, but then close off selectively — will squeeze out fully generative technologies, to the detriment of innovation and enhancement of exquisite regulatory control. This is in part because the amateur nerds that drive innovation here rarely read the fine print; teenagers will code for the Facebook, iPhone and Google platforms without thinking about the ways in which their advances can be eliminated or proprietized.
Adam’s point of view is sympathetic to markets and skeptical of government intervention. He rightly asks why the market doesn’t just solve this. For that, I point to my reply to similar questions raised to parts of FOI that have been excerpted in the Boston Review:
Will the market solve this problem? Generative technologies allow consumers to become participants: to change technologies for themselves or to adopt improvements offered by others not operating through the usual mechanisms of the firm. Whether this is a market force depends on how broadly we define the term. Is any voluntary behavior endogenous to a market? Or are only those choices that have to do with purchases? If a group of people coalesces in Central Park for a game of Ultimate Frisbee, is the market for Ultimate working its magic? The question is important because often we rely too readily on the solutions proposed by firms and government. If there’s litter in a public space, the government should fine violators and clean it up, or pay a firm to do so. But the amount of litter in a park may depend not so much on the rules against it or the schedule for cleaning, but rather on the habits and normative commitments of the people who use it.
The solutions to the generative dilemma that I find most interesting are ones that don’t assume a zero-sum tradeoff between generativity and security. If we narrow ourselves to firms offering some devices that are generative but quickly compromised, and others that are sterile or contingently generative, but incapable of generating whimsical change, the market will no doubt achieve equilibrium somewhere along the axis. Bruce Owen figures that demand will create supply and the optimal point will be achieved. But Owen’s faith in the market ignores the role that a civic instinct can play if people take shared responsibility for their own and others’ security. To do so, they will need certain tools. But those tools may not be money makers, thus the market may not produce them. If the reply is “well, yes, but someone named Jimbo was moved to produce Wikipedia, and his charity is part of the market,” then the market is circularly defined as every possible action by someone. We can contribute more to our shared public life than what results indirectly through our buying or voting.
Moreover, the market may have trouble pricing the benefits of generative platforms. Behavioral economics is beginning to confirm the conventional wisdom that people do not plan very well. This is true in the PC market where people making platform investment decisions rarely weigh the unknown as part of their thought processes. They buy the PC for email or Web surfing, and only later find that it can be used for Internet telephony. And often the platform’s buyer is not the same as the user. Much of the revolution in PC software has taken place through user adventurousness on office computers acquired by companies for other reasons. What the economists might call an “agency gap” has produced great things. The true value of generative technologies is too easily dismissed when portrayed, á la Owen, as “the extent to which end-users and their communicants may indulge the whim to customize these tools.” What’s at stake is not just setting wallpaper style on your iPhone, but the very Net generativity that has facilitated entire new markets and social relationships.
Looking back, the market produced some sterile, competing consumer networks—CompuServe, the Source, and the like. Non-market forces led production on another course—the Internet. To be sure, the Internet’s reach was greatly extended through its later commercialization, but had the Internet’s architecture been obvious enough for the market to discover it, no modest government subsidies would have been needed. Sperry Rand, IBM, and Prodigy would have easily outpaced academics in producing the technologies underlying the dot-com boom. They did not.
I imagine Adam might agree with me on not reaching too quickly to government for solutions — the question is whether some of the cooperative solutions (rather than regulatory interventions) I suggest have any traction for a market-oriented thinker.
10 Responses to “Dichotomies and markets”
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Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation and Director of Graduate Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.
Available for pre-order for an April 2008 release:
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Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It
Quick point of information:
Regarding: “but someone named Jimbo was moved to produce Wikipedia, and his charity is part of the market,”
Wikipedia was not conceived as charity. It was originally intended as a commercial attention-getting gimmick for Jimbo’s tawdry portal business “Bomis”. It was made into a nonprofit after it didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so it could get charity funding. Then it took off phenomenally, and there’s an incentive to rewrite history to give the idea that that was the plan all along. Wikipedia is an extremely weird thing (in terms of having hit several very unlikely wins) that people try to use to justify all sorts of cyber-utopian ideas, but it’s like someone winning a lottery being used to justify economic policy.
If you re-conceptualize market as a platform for exchange, for dialogue, for bargaining, for sharing—as was the Silk Road—rather than merely a place for buying and selling, the dichotomy between sterile and generative technology diminishes. Sterile and generative are relative terms.
ND Batra
There was a point in your talk on Friday when you came close to asking for more, not less, political consciousness and sensitivity in the hacker brigade (as you do above “the amateur nerds that drive innovation here rarely read the fine print; teenagers will code for the Facebook, iPhone and Google platforms without thinking about the ways in which their advances can be eliminated or proprietized…). I think this point is spot on but I wonder how well it will heard and understood by a community, one very sizeable portion of which very proudly proclaims a political agnosticsm as a badge of honor. In many ways, the rift between the open source and free software partisans is a reflection of this: with one side urging the other to become more sensitive to the broader implications of their work, and the other steadfastly refusing to do anything but talk about code. It might seem obvious that to declare oneself apolitical is to take a political position, but I don’t think thats how all young hackers see it.
I think you are dead wrong. iPhone either does or will have a JVM. Many devices run embeded forms of Linux. There are literally hundreds of hacked ROMs for Smartphones. People turn their XBOXes into simple Linux machines. Just last week I built a robot around a VEX Labs kit. And I expect to see an open phone platform here in the near future. There are companies like Digikey offering products to the consumer that would have been almost impossible to acquire 10 years ago. Don’t forget about Skype — look where one person’s well executed idea has taken global communications. Now you have Skype phones. I can promise you the heart of those phones are very generic.
No, being able to put a picture on the Internet will not be a big accomplishment anymore, but the comsumer has the power to build an Internet accessable digital picture frame for a few 100 dollars. Just plug a PCMCIA card of your choice into the machine. One could just be WiFi and the other could talk to your local ISP. A single board computer, a 6 inch TFT screen, a little wood work, and some programming and you’re done.
Woe to s/he who speaks of “market” forces. The Internet itself is very much the exception to the macro trend in America, at least, towards consolidation, control, and exclusionary practices.
There should be great concern- there is a widespread push to saturate the consumer market with sterile devices regardless of “market” forces.
Inertia is as much a force in the financial sense as the physical. Once powerful vested interests depend on a technology, you can be assured change will be stifled.
David Brin here, author of The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? (The latest Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference is featuring a tenth anniversary commemoration of that book, next week.)
I just wanted to congratulate you on THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET. I especially liked the point you made on Charlie Rose, about how sites like Second Life and MySpace seem almost-deliberately designed in order to lobotomize conversation, reducing “discourse” to the level of (at best) a single sentence or ROTFL.
I’m glad someone out there has noticed! Because right now, the consensus among Net cogniscenti seems to be that there’s nothing at all wrong with the 40 year old, teletype-based scrolling “chat” mode. The only parallel I can think of is the near universal rejection of both GUI and hypercard… till they became suddenly “obvious.”
Larry Brilliant invited me to give a Google Tech Talk: http://tinyurl.com/yy7yxm about all this last year. It may entertain you. If so, you can reach me via http://www.davidbrin.com
Keep up the great work.
With cordial regards,
David Brin
http://www.davidbrin.com
Well done, Jonathan! Because you’re an Oxford professor, lick spittles and snobs at the BBC, et.al. start fawning and giving you way too much publicity. Just keep on using those pseudo-intellectual sound bites, like ‘generative technologies’, that make people think you know more than they do: scribblers just love that sort of nonsense.
The idea that HTTP is somehow going to evaporate is hilarious. As long as anyone can throw up a web site and anyone else can connect to it, we’ll be fine.
Now, if someone would only develop a nonsense filter so that the superstition merchants could be cut off from the rest of us… Actually, that would be a good project for you! Put your money where your mouth is and develop something that’s ‘generative’. I wonder if you are sufficiently capable
Go HTTP!
P.S. Oh, no it’s happened: the end of HTTP. I hit Submit to leave a reply and I got …
Network Error (tcp_error)
A communication error occurred: “”
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.
For assistance, contact your network support team.
The irony! I can’t take it any more. We’re all doomed!