The Internet has become an integral part of our world. It connects all kinds of technologies from sports streaming to stock trading to selfie posting. But, in the grand history of technology, it’s not all that old.
How did the Internet become so expansive in so little time? There are two major components in the rise of the Internet. 1) The creation of modular networking that allowed for fast growth. 2) The culture of self-governance and collaboration that fueled the early innovators. In this episode, Harvard's Prof. Jonathan Zittrain explains the impact of these two components as well as the shifting future of Internet governance.
Topics:
- Origins of the Internet - How the Internet Expanded so Rapidly
- The Early Internet
- Generative Technology - What is it?
- Early Regulation and Innovation - the Internet Wild West
- "Is this lack of regulation the current model of the Internet? Should it be?"
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Bio:
Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He directs the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
All righty Well.
Welcome, professor Zitrin, tothe podcast.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
A pleasure.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You study basically governing the Internet as well
as the history of how we'vegoverned the Internet in the
past, and one of the thingsthat's fascinating about the
Internet is how quickly itexpanded from kind of a hobbyist
thing and kind of an academicsituation all the way to where
it is now.
Of course we're talking on Zoom, so it's gone quite
significantly and had a lot ofchanges over the years.
How did that happen?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Well, the way that I think bankruptcy was once
described as slowly and then allat once, and actually having it
happen that way, is reallyimportant to its development.
It really influenced itsdevelopment because it did spend
time as a backwater and wasseen as a kind of hobbyist or
(00:50):
non-commercial sector kind ofthing for all sorts of reasons
and as a result it had a chanceto develop and get a certain
momentum, independent of only aVC-backed straight-up dot-com
model.
That model produces all sortsof things and more generally
(01:14):
competition in a regularmarketplace produces
refrigerators and jet planes andhair salons or whatever.
But as an infrastructural thingfor the internet to develop the
way it did, in a non-commercialsense and not sweating who
would get charged from somecentral bank for just getting
access, that it was kind of openfor anybody to build their way
(01:36):
towards, as long as they couldbuild a path towards somebody
already on the internet.
That's quite extraordinary theway that it developed.
And then, as it became sort ofa free-for-all architecture for
anybody wanting to engage withothers, including commercially,
to sell stuff and buy stuff, uhit, it took on that much more.
(01:58):
That's the all at once uh point,which I would say was probably
the spring of 1998, if we haveto be very precise, that got it
on a certain path, but it stillcontains so many elements of
that pre-inflationary existenceand it's always helpful, I find,
to be thinking about.
(02:19):
For so many of the technologieswe care about, including the
ones very much in the headlinestoday whether it's yesterday's
headlines around cryptocurrencyor today's around AI to what
extent are they based in what Icall an unowned, non-commercial
collective hallucination kind ofway, versus kind of like the
(02:42):
production of fridges?
This is just companiescompeting, because if you want
to understand the dynamics,including how to govern them,
knowing which box they drifttowards is really helpful.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So for those who aren't really familiar with the
history of the internet, can wekind of start off where it
started as DARPAnet.
Is that correct?
And then it's obviouslyexpanded.
So what was it like in thebeginning?
For those that correct?
And then it's obviouslyexpanded.
So what was it like in thebeginning for those who don't
know what it looked like?
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Well, it was always touted as experimental.
It was a pilot project, a demoon how networking might take
place, and it's true that theDefense Department was involved
in funding a lot of researchers.
Darpa has grants, the DefenseAdvanced Research Projects
(03:28):
Agency.
They have grants that they giveto researchers to work on stuff
the Defense Department caresabout, and those in turn have
different categories.
Internet was in the fuzziestcategory and I think the oh it
was meant to withstand a nuclearwar is sort of apocryphal.
It was more about experimentingwith networking.
(03:50):
There were program managers atDARPA who thought that
interesting and then started tofund some of the researchers.
We're talking like the 1960s tostart with, and into the 1970s,
on how networks might work.
If you didn't have a big truckroll of cable to lay from every
(04:11):
single location to every otherlocation where you wanted signal
to go, what might that looklike?
And thinking about how toconceptualize a network, not as
a series of wires orparticularly the modality of
communication like wireless, butrather as a mode of
(04:32):
interoperation.
So somebody that already had alittle bit of a wireless network
could bring that network to thetable and interconnect with
somebody who had a wired network.
Somebody who had a wirednetwork.
That's a pretty unusual way tothink about building a network,
and that's the essence ofinternet working, where you talk
(04:52):
about protocols that would runon top of any given hardware or
physical configuration and thatthose protocols would allow
interoperation.
So you need some standard forlike, how do you address people,
what is one address versusanother?
So you would know where thedata is going, like the
equivalent in a phone network ofphone numbers.
(05:14):
And then how would youcommunicate?
And what does thatcommunication look like?
Especially if the networkconfiguration itself is a stone
soup of people bringingdifferent stuff to the table and
you never know if they're goingto take it back.
So a network that can beorganically and readily
(05:34):
self-aware enough to bereconfigurable without some
central office having to be likeI see there's an accident on
Main Street or Main Street nolonger exists.
I guess people are takingSecond Avenue today.
Those are some reallymind-blowing solutions, the way
that the internet came up withto those kinds of problems, and
(05:57):
that included both the idea ofmodularity.
You could end up not needing toknow anything about how to
build a street while stillknowing how to travel safely
upon it.
In this case, you don't need toknow about physical wires or
wireless in order to do internetprotocol and vice versa
(06:28):
pathways, and by breaking datainto little packets and
reassembling them later, thosepackets can be blended for
transport.
That's just totally radicallydifferent from, say, the phone
network of the time where anopen line between New York and
LA which then terminates at BellTelephone stations and then
that station has an onwarddedicated pair of copper wires
(06:49):
to go to every single house thatserves that station.
That's a totally differentconception.
And packet switching.
I think it's still to thesurprise of some internet
engineers that it works forNetflix and it feels totally
great in 4K HD until it isn't.
But you know the idea that thiscould work I still.
(07:10):
It's breathtaking to me in 2023, looking back to 1973.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
It's quite interesting because it seems to
be, as you talked about,building a network that can
expand quite rapidly.
The term used for this is agenerative technology.
Could you discuss that a littlebit?
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yeah, I think of a generative technology as one
that is somewhat is kind ofhalf-baked.
The people making thetechnology think it's
interesting for its own sake andthey figure that whoever will
use the technology can bake itthe rest of the way, and by that
I mean figure out how they wantto use it and what they want to
(07:51):
do with it, so that, uh, youdon't try to specify upfront
exactly who's doing what, oreven shape or control it.
So examples of non or lessgenerative technologies would be
the television network, whereit's understood that there are
(08:12):
broadcasters and there arereceivers and you're either a
broadcaster with a license fromthe US FCC or you're somebody
who buys a TV and tunes intostuff.
A different conception, a muchmore generative one, would be
saying something like the PCwhich, when a laptop rolls off
(08:33):
the assembly line, it might comebundled with some software, but
it's up to you to figure outwhat software you want to run.
You want to run a differentbrowser, pick a different
browser.
If somebody wants to give you adifferent browser, they don't
have to clear it with Dell or HPor Apple, with a big asterisk
these days for the app store,because there weren't networks
(08:59):
networking everything toconsumers.
So you would just go to thestore and buy software off a
shelf and take it home and runit, and the famously
monopolistic Bill Gates wouldnot have anything to say about
what you chose to run on his PCafter it left one of the
licensee so-called OEM factoriesand the internet's the same way
.
I mean there were lessgenerative proprietary networks
(09:21):
like AOL and CompuServe andGenie and Delphi and the Source,
that when you tuned in therewas a main menu and they billed
you by the minute and they triedto come up with stuff that
would keep you entertained.
So you'd keep paying by theminute.
But you were in their world.
You were on their TV show thatwas just more interactive, or
their TV station, Whereas theinternet is basically the same
(09:43):
kind of blinking cursor thatoriginal PCs had.
It's like, all right, you're onthe internet.
You're like, well, where's themain menu of the internet?
And it's like there isn't one.
There's just the internet.
Tell me who you want tocommunicate with.
And sometimes people might feelthere's a main menu because
they're in a browser and thebrowser defaults to googlecom or
something.
But that's a choice that youcan make or revise in a way that
(10:06):
a less generative technologywouldn't allow.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
One of the questions that you always see when we talk
about regulation and then theinternet, of course is so if the
internet expanded so quickly,it might not have had a lot of
regulation around it.
So there's this idea that lessregulation equals to faster
innovation, and so break a lotof things.
There's the classic term movefast and break things right in
Silicon Valley.
Is that a real concept?
(10:32):
Of course, there are probablylimitations to that.
What do you think about thatidea?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
about that idea.
Well, I do think it captures animportant element of the early
days of the development of theinternet, and the fact that
there was no gatekeeping meantthat there was no gatekeeping
that could easily be done,including by governmental
authorities, not just bysomebody that says it's my mall,
I get to say whether you have astore in it, kind of thing.
And it also meant that therewould be a level of risk taking,
either by just individualstruly setting up a website and
(11:04):
being like wow, that workedbetter than I thought.
Like I think of circa the year2000, Sean Fanning at
Northeastern University, on hisspring break, cooks up Napster
(11:32):
and suddenly people could taketracks off their CDs, which were
intended for CD players.
But then there were CD-ROMunits and computers that could
quote, rip the data off, andthen you'd have these MP3 files
and then you could upload themand quote, share them on Napster
with other people.
I mean, it's just networking,You're doing file transfer,
what's the big deal?
But of course, that was thebeginning of what would be
(11:53):
approximately a 15-year war overcopyright infringement and
piracy, and I think there mighthave been in a world where only
mature companies couldparticipate.
They'd all be like, well, thatwould be copyright infringement.
We obviously can't do that.
But when anybody can do it orwhen anybody can get
(12:13):
venture-backed to do it, butthey don't care if it's a little
bit sketchy from existingframeworks, that is part of the
innovation of that time andthat's the move fast and break
things.
It's like is Uber legal?
I don't know, it doesn't lookthat legal.
(12:34):
Don't you need a medallion todrive people around for money?
You're a Jitney service and wehaven't had those in a while.
And it's like well, they'redoing it, People are liking it
and if enough people like it,it's going to be awfully hard to
tell them to stop.
That's a really interesting andweird way of going about things
(12:54):
and I think for any frameworkwhich I had largely in a book
called the Future of theInternet and how to Stop it
celebrated that framework,understanding that mileage will
vary.
For any framework you are goingto want to say how generative do
you want it to be?
I mean, if it turned out therewas an easy way to turn
(13:15):
discarded aluminum cans intouranium, I don't think I'd be
like well, that's a cool,generative thing.
I wonder what people will buildout of this highly radioactive
substance.
That would be like no, thatshould be licensed and we should
ban it or whatever it is, andit kind of points towards new
technologies like generative AI.
(13:37):
I think we got to evaluate themon their own terms for the
costs and benefits.
To the extent we can evenpredict them around cutting them
loose.
I mean, generally,democratization of tech seems
really good.
There are other forms ofdemocratization of some tech
that are less good.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, that was my last question before we wrap up
is does this model still hold?
Because we look around and wesee the internet and we see
Google, we see Facebook, nowmeta, and then, of course, we
have all of the platforms off ofthat.
Is the internet still kind of agenerative place?
Of course, hobbyists can stillcreate a lot of stuff, but it
seems to be a lot of it is owned.
(14:18):
You have Amazon servers.
What do you think about that?
Is the internet?
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yes, well, the internet is so ecumenical about
what can be built upon it thatyou can build non-generative
stuff on top of it.
And that was even true when Iwas writing that book 15 years
ago now, and it's true today.
And, yes, the upstarts havethemselves become big legacy
(14:47):
players and there may be, formany things we want out of a
flourishing informationecosystem, real problems with
reintroducing a handful ofgatekeepers and including some
of the privacy dimensions ofbeing astride, so much personal
information where you might sayas a matter of public policy
(15:10):
even.
Are there ways in which weshould try to, you know, clear
the table and start over again,or be able to shake and break
things up a little bit, or beable to shake and break things
up a little bit?
I sometimes think that there isa more or less constant volume
and pressure of people who loveto tinker and they just try to
(15:33):
find out where that tinkeringcan take place.
So maybe pre-internet it washam radio and they were building
their own radios.
They went to Radio Shack andordered transistors by the pound
or something or kits, and thenham radio gave way to internet
(15:55):
stuff, or even in between, itgave way to coding on PCs,
without networks but stillwriting software.
And these days, whatever onemight think about the grifting
elements of Web3, a marketingterm and of cryptocurrencies and
computational blockchain andstuff like that, there are a lot
(16:18):
of people involved with that,not simply with name, your unit
of currency signs in their eyes,but because it feels like a
generative space in which theycan imagine and try to bring
into reality a different futureand thinking about where those
spaces are and should be and canbe.
And some are probably morefitting in the public interest
(16:42):
than others.
Some are more harnessing ofcooperative instincts than
others.
Think of Wikipedia as a greatexample of a generative space at
the content layer, for whichthe only thing that ultimately
powers it are people who areprepared to subscribe to the
ethos of Wikipedia and becomeeditors.
So having great places forfolks like that to meet one
(17:06):
another, build stuff, expressand self-govern.
This gets full circle to how you, I think, opened our
conversation Thinking aboutgovernance.
I think too often when we thinkof the word, it immediately
just becomes regulation.
There's a bunch of stuffhappening.
Some of it's going to be bad.
Government is there to protectus from bad things and in many
(17:28):
instances, in the ideal, itabsolutely is.
But if the things that arehappening are happening because
of private companies and wethink of them as kind of a
customer service issue, I'mgetting harassed online I'm
going to press the I've beenharassed button and come on,
already, fix it.
It is the responsibility ofcompanies making a ton of money
(17:50):
to create safe environments butat the same time who said this?
All had to be corporate anyway.
What environments can weimagine?
Have we seen, could we buildout that lets strangers who
share something in common,including a desire for discourse
, if they don't have anythingelse in common, what are the
(18:12):
technologies and practices thatcan bring them together and,
when they have a problem, figureout how to solve it through an
act of collectiveself-governance, which is
ultimately what we expect ofreal government, if it is a
democracy.
How to do that is what reallyinterests me.
And thinking about newinstitutions and institutional
(18:38):
relationships at a time when theway I've been thinking of it is
, first, we don't know what wewant, we can't agree on that,
and second, we don't trustanybody to give it to us.
That's the challenge ofgovernance today.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Unfortunately, we have to wrap up this discussion
about this huge topic that spansdecades, literally, but I do
want to ask you our last twoquestions, which are what books
have had an impact on you?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Well, one book was by a critic named Neil Postman in
the mid 90s and so he wasn'tthinking about internet stuff at
all called Technopoly, theSurrender of Culture to
Technology, and it has a littlebit of a vibe of get off my lawn
(19:29):
to it, but it was.
He was kind of beholding thephenomenon of cable television
and the many new stations andwhat they, in his view, were
gravitating towards, and lookingat the way that the technology
(19:49):
of cable TV was driving ourentire culture, in his view,
from a written one back to anoral one and what that meant.
And I mean it's prettymagisterial.
It talks about thousands ofyears ago going from an oral
culture to a written one, andwhile there's still plenty of
(20:10):
typing and reading today, whichis nominally writing, it's so
interesting to me how much ofhis sensibilities again thinking
about cable, not about internetapply to what we've got now,
including what it might be doingto our attention spans.
So I don't know, that's a kindof pessimistic sort of book, but
(20:34):
I think still one that has justaged really interestingly,
given that its subject matterhas evolved so much.
And another one I just mightflag was a collection of essays
called the Mind's Eye Letter IFantasies and Reflections on
Self and Soul by Douglas RHofstadter and Daniel Dennett
(20:58):
Folks who think about mind,brain and computation, and it
was written in the mid-80s andbecause it's a bunch of essays,
there's a lot of voices withinit.
They wrote openers and closers,little wrappers around the
essays, which is also just areally interesting way
pre-Twitter or other instantdiscourse mechanisms to again
(21:24):
get reaction and conversationinto things.
It was a neat meta piece to thebook.
You get to read the editor'sreactions to stuff along with
the stuff.
And again, how much things havechanged in the field of
artificial intelligence sincethe 80s when they were writing
it.
And it's just such a neatbracketing so that I guess it's
(21:47):
part of a larger project.
I feel I've got to not, as is sotempting and often driven to do
, look at new phenomenon in techas if a spaceship just dropped
them off and scooted away andit's like well now what this
thing happened.
Do we regulate it?
Is it legal?
What do we do?
But rather, thinking aboutwhere it has come from, where
(22:09):
it's at now and the multipledifferent places it could be
going, depending on choices thatpeople make, understanding that
the power of choice is lumpilydistributed, unfairly allocated,
that there's all sorts ofsocial and political power
layers to all this.
So those are two books I mightput forward as blasts from a
(22:30):
pretty recent but, in technologytimes, quite different past
that might have resonance today.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah, the other Neil Postman book that you always
hear about is amusing ourselvesto death.
I haven't read it, but it'sdefinitely one of those books
that it's on the list.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Once you tell somebody to get off their lawn,
you.
It is a font of any number ofbooks.
He also wrote a building abridge to the 19th century, the
end of education, which he meantas sort of a double entendre,
both the purpose and the end ofit.
And again, you know he was agrumpy guy, but he still kind of
(23:08):
had a twinkle in his eye too.
I was very lucky to at somepoint, when we started our
Berkman Klein Center forInternet and Society at the
university here, invited him upto give a talk.
He was kind of shocked.
It was weird.
It was as if nobody asked himto give talks.
He came up and gave a reallyinteresting talk now on the cusp
of the internet age.
This must have been 1996, 97,maybe 98.
(23:30):
And yeah, it was just a reallyinteresting time.
But yes, his entire oeuvremight be worth looking at.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah.
The last question is whatadvice do you have for teenagers
?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Well, first, just on behalf of Generation X, an
apology.
Just sorry, this wasn't on ourbingo card.
This wasn't how it was reallysupposed to be.
In the throes of at least myoptimism of the early aughts,
late 90s uh, including thecelebration of what the internet
(24:08):
and new tech could bring, um,you know, the seeds of
everything that would grow fromit were planted then.
They were there, and there werepeople then who saw it too, not
just like Neil Postman and Ithink it is an extraordinarily
(24:29):
more difficult proposition tonavigate a transition from
childhood to adulthood than itwas in prior generations.
And you know, at some pointyou're looking at Maslow's
hierarchy and you're like well,you know, you're not in a coal
mine at age six or something.
I get that.
But the way in which and again,I've got Neil Postman on the
(24:54):
brain, I don't normally butwe've been talking about him.
You know his end of childhood,or I said end of education, but
I think he also wrote somethingabout childhood and maybe it was
the end of childhood, and I'mconfusing the education and
childhood books.
Um, but uh, it's hard to be akid when there are no longer
(25:17):
natural boundaries to yourcontext.
I'm with my family.
Now what happens with my familypretty much stays with my
family.
I mean that in a good way.
There are obviously bad thingstoo that can happen, and when
I'm at school, I'm at school,and if there's a problem at
school, my school has to dealwith it.
(25:37):
And maybe they won't, but theyneed to, rather than everything
being one TikTok away from beingon everybody's mind and
everybody wanting to offer anopinion on it, and I think
there's a commoditization ofourselves and an implicit
competition of what we can offerfor views.
(25:57):
That is just really plays intoit's.
It's stuff that teenage rockand roll players who became
famous as rock and roll artistsas kids had to navigate as rock
stars, and it's like I thinkthere's so many more people now
(26:19):
that have to navigate that, andso, anyway, this is all an
apology.
What's my advice?
I guess the advice is to try tobuild a little bit of the
buffer that isn't naturallythere anymore to find the pond
you want to swim in, and notalways have it have to connect
(26:41):
to the entire ocean andhopefully it's a pond that you
really can feel at home in andbe your best self in and explore
what selves you want to be andexperience joy and fun rather
than stress.
And the wolf is at my heels,with the wolf either being
(27:03):
fellow kids, because they're notalways so nice to each other,
or the wolf is gosh.
If I don't line things up right, I'm gonna get off track and
you know I'm gonna be miserableand unsuccessful.
It's just a really big trip tolay on someone or to have
somebody put on themselves at anearly age.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Well, thank you so much, Professor Zitron, for
coming on the podcast.
I really enjoyed ourconversation.
I feel like we covered, ofcourse, the origins of the
internet and how it's kind ofevolved to today, as well as
where that's left us with youradvice section as a culture and
like the next generation.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Thank you, Taylor.
It's great to think about thesethings.
Thank you for prompting me todo them.
All righty Well.
Welcome, professor Zitrin, tothe podcast.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
A pleasure.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You study basically governing the Internet as well
as the history of how we'vegoverned the Internet in the
past, and one of the thingsthat's fascinating about the
Internet is how quickly itexpanded from kind of a hobbyist
thing and kind of an academicsituation all the way to where
it is now.
Of course we're talking on Zoom, so it's gone quite
significantly and had a lot ofchanges over the years.
How did that happen?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Well, the way that I think bankruptcy was once
described as slowly and then allat once, and actually having it
happen that way, is reallyimportant to its development.
It really influenced itsdevelopment because it did spend
time as a backwater and wasseen as a kind of hobbyist or
(00:50):
non-commercial sector kind ofthing for all sorts of reasons
and as a result it had a chanceto develop and get a certain
momentum, independent of only aVC-backed straight-up dot-com
model.
That model produces all sortsof things and more generally
(01:14):
competition in a regularmarketplace produces
refrigerators and jet planes andhair salons or whatever.
But as an infrastructural thingfor the internet to develop the
way it did, in a non-commercialsense and not sweating who
would get charged from somecentral bank for just getting
access, that it was kind of openfor anybody to build their way
(01:36):
towards, as long as they couldbuild a path towards somebody
already on the internet.
That's quite extraordinary theway that it developed.
And then, as it became sort ofa free-for-all architecture for
anybody wanting to engage withothers, including commercially,
to sell stuff and buy stuff, uhit, it took on that much more.
(01:58):
That's the all at once uh point,which I would say was probably
the spring of 1998, if we haveto be very precise, that got it
on a certain path, but it stillcontains so many elements of
that pre-inflationary existenceand it's always helpful, I find,
to be thinking about.
(02:19):
For so many of the technologieswe care about, including the
ones very much in the headlinestoday whether it's yesterday's
headlines around cryptocurrencyor today's around AI to what
extent are they based in what Icall an unowned, non-commercial
collective hallucination kind ofway, versus kind of like the
(02:42):
production of fridges?
This is just companiescompeting, because if you want
to understand the dynamics,including how to govern them,
knowing which box they drifttowards is really helpful.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So for those who aren't really familiar with the
history of the internet, can wekind of start off where it
started as DARPAnet.
Is that correct?
And then it's obviouslyexpanded.
So what was it like in thebeginning?
For those that correct?
And then it's obviouslyexpanded.
So what was it like in thebeginning for those who don't
know what it looked like?
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Well, it was always touted as experimental.
It was a pilot project, a demoon how networking might take
place, and it's true that theDefense Department was involved
in funding a lot of researchers.
Darpa has grants, the DefenseAdvanced Research Projects
(03:28):
Agency.
They have grants that they giveto researchers to work on stuff
the Defense Department caresabout, and those in turn have
different categories.
Internet was in the fuzziestcategory and I think the oh it
was meant to withstand a nuclearwar is sort of apocryphal.
It was more about experimentingwith networking.
(03:50):
There were program managers atDARPA who thought that
interesting and then started tofund some of the researchers.
We're talking like the 1960s tostart with, and into the 1970s,
on how networks might work.
If you didn't have a big truckroll of cable to lay from every
(04:11):
single location to every otherlocation where you wanted signal
to go, what might that looklike?
And thinking about how toconceptualize a network, not as
a series of wires orparticularly the modality of
communication like wireless, butrather as a mode of
(04:32):
interoperation.
So somebody that already had alittle bit of a wireless network
could bring that network to thetable and interconnect with
somebody who had a wired network.
Somebody who had a wirednetwork.
That's a pretty unusual way tothink about building a network,
and that's the essence ofinternet working, where you talk
(04:52):
about protocols that would runon top of any given hardware or
physical configuration and thatthose protocols would allow
interoperation.
So you need some standard forlike, how do you address people,
what is one address versusanother?
So you would know where thedata is going, like the
equivalent in a phone network ofphone numbers.
(05:14):
And then how would youcommunicate?
And what does thatcommunication look like?
Especially if the networkconfiguration itself is a stone
soup of people bringingdifferent stuff to the table and
you never know if they're goingto take it back.
So a network that can beorganically and readily
(05:34):
self-aware enough to bereconfigurable without some
central office having to be likeI see there's an accident on
Main Street or Main Street nolonger exists.
I guess people are takingSecond Avenue today.
Those are some reallymind-blowing solutions, the way
that the internet came up withto those kinds of problems, and
(05:57):
that included both the idea ofmodularity.
You could end up not needing toknow anything about how to
build a street while stillknowing how to travel safely
upon it.
In this case, you don't need toknow about physical wires or
wireless in order to do internetprotocol and vice versa
(06:28):
pathways, and by breaking datainto little packets and
reassembling them later, thosepackets can be blended for
transport.
That's just totally radicallydifferent from, say, the phone
network of the time where anopen line between New York and
LA which then terminates at BellTelephone stations and then
that station has an onwarddedicated pair of copper wires
(06:49):
to go to every single house thatserves that station.
That's a totally differentconception.
And packet switching.
I think it's still to thesurprise of some internet
engineers that it works forNetflix and it feels totally
great in 4K HD until it isn't.
But you know the idea that thiscould work I still.
(07:10):
It's breathtaking to me in 2023, looking back to 1973.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
It's quite interesting because it seems to
be, as you talked about,building a network that can
expand quite rapidly.
The term used for this is agenerative technology.
Could you discuss that a littlebit?
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yeah, I think of a generative technology as one
that is somewhat is kind ofhalf-baked.
The people making thetechnology think it's
interesting for its own sake andthey figure that whoever will
use the technology can bake itthe rest of the way, and by that
I mean figure out how they wantto use it and what they want to
(07:51):
do with it, so that, uh, youdon't try to specify upfront
exactly who's doing what, oreven shape or control it.
So examples of non or lessgenerative technologies would be
the television network, whereit's understood that there are
(08:12):
broadcasters and there arereceivers and you're either a
broadcaster with a license fromthe US FCC or you're somebody
who buys a TV and tunes intostuff.
A different conception, a muchmore generative one, would be
saying something like the PCwhich, when a laptop rolls off
(08:33):
the assembly line, it might comebundled with some software, but
it's up to you to figure outwhat software you want to run.
You want to run a differentbrowser, pick a different
browser.
If somebody wants to give you adifferent browser, they don't
have to clear it with Dell or HPor Apple, with a big asterisk
these days for the app store,because there weren't networks
(08:59):
networking everything toconsumers.
So you would just go to thestore and buy software off a
shelf and take it home and runit, and the famously
monopolistic Bill Gates wouldnot have anything to say about
what you chose to run on his PCafter it left one of the
licensee so-called OEM factoriesand the internet's the same way
.
I mean there were lessgenerative proprietary networks
(09:21):
like AOL and CompuServe andGenie and Delphi and the Source,
that when you tuned in therewas a main menu and they billed
you by the minute and they triedto come up with stuff that
would keep you entertained.
So you'd keep paying by theminute.
But you were in their world.
You were on their TV show thatwas just more interactive, or
their TV station, Whereas theinternet is basically the same
(09:43):
kind of blinking cursor thatoriginal PCs had.
It's like, all right, you're onthe internet.
You're like, well, where's themain menu of the internet?
And it's like there isn't one.
There's just the internet.
Tell me who you want tocommunicate with.
And sometimes people might feelthere's a main menu because
they're in a browser and thebrowser defaults to googlecom or
something.
But that's a choice that youcan make or revise in a way that
(10:06):
a less generative technologywouldn't allow.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
One of the questions that you always see when we talk
about regulation and then theinternet, of course is so if the
internet expanded so quickly,it might not have had a lot of
regulation around it.
So there's this idea that lessregulation equals to faster
innovation, and so break a lotof things.
There's the classic term movefast and break things right in
Silicon Valley.
Is that a real concept?
(10:32):
Of course, there are probablylimitations to that.
What do you think about thatidea?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
about that idea.
Well, I do think it captures animportant element of the early
days of the development of theinternet, and the fact that
there was no gatekeeping meantthat there was no gatekeeping
that could easily be done,including by governmental
authorities, not just bysomebody that says it's my mall,
I get to say whether you have astore in it, kind of thing.
And it also meant that therewould be a level of risk taking,
either by just individualstruly setting up a website and
(11:04):
being like wow, that workedbetter than I thought.
Like I think of circa the year2000, Sean Fanning at
Northeastern University, on hisspring break, cooks up Napster
(11:32):
and suddenly people could taketracks off their CDs, which were
intended for CD players.
But then there were CD-ROMunits and computers that could
quote, rip the data off, andthen you'd have these MP3 files
and then you could upload themand quote, share them on Napster
with other people.
I mean, it's just networking,You're doing file transfer,
what's the big deal?
But of course, that was thebeginning of what would be
(11:53):
approximately a 15-year war overcopyright infringement and
piracy, and I think there mighthave been in a world where only
mature companies couldparticipate.
They'd all be like, well, thatwould be copyright infringement.
We obviously can't do that.
But when anybody can do it orwhen anybody can get
(12:13):
venture-backed to do it, butthey don't care if it's a little
bit sketchy from existingframeworks, that is part of the
innovation of that time andthat's the move fast and break
things.
It's like is Uber legal?
I don't know, it doesn't lookthat legal.
(12:34):
Don't you need a medallion todrive people around for money?
You're a Jitney service and wehaven't had those in a while.
And it's like well, they'redoing it, People are liking it
and if enough people like it,it's going to be awfully hard to
tell them to stop.
That's a really interesting andweird way of going about things
(12:54):
and I think for any frameworkwhich I had largely in a book
called the Future of theInternet and how to Stop it
celebrated that framework,understanding that mileage will
vary.
For any framework you are goingto want to say how generative do
you want it to be?
I mean, if it turned out therewas an easy way to turn
(13:15):
discarded aluminum cans intouranium, I don't think I'd be
like well, that's a cool,generative thing.
I wonder what people will buildout of this highly radioactive
substance.
That would be like no, thatshould be licensed and we should
ban it or whatever it is, andit kind of points towards new
technologies like generative AI.
(13:37):
I think we got to evaluate themon their own terms for the
costs and benefits.
To the extent we can evenpredict them around cutting them
loose.
I mean, generally,democratization of tech seems
really good.
There are other forms ofdemocratization of some tech
that are less good.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, that was my last question before we wrap up
is does this model still hold?
Because we look around and wesee the internet and we see
Google, we see Facebook, nowmeta, and then, of course, we
have all of the platforms off ofthat.
Is the internet still kind of agenerative place?
Of course, hobbyists can stillcreate a lot of stuff, but it
seems to be a lot of it is owned.
(14:18):
You have Amazon servers.
What do you think about that?
Is the internet?
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yes, well, the internet is so ecumenical about
what can be built upon it thatyou can build non-generative
stuff on top of it.
And that was even true when Iwas writing that book 15 years
ago now, and it's true today.
And, yes, the upstarts havethemselves become big legacy
(14:47):
players and there may be, formany things we want out of a
flourishing informationecosystem, real problems with
reintroducing a handful ofgatekeepers and including some
of the privacy dimensions ofbeing astride, so much personal
information where you might sayas a matter of public policy
(15:10):
even.
Are there ways in which weshould try to, you know, clear
the table and start over again,or be able to shake and break
things up a little bit, or beable to shake and break things
up a little bit?
I sometimes think that there isa more or less constant volume
and pressure of people who loveto tinker and they just try to
(15:33):
find out where that tinkeringcan take place.
So maybe pre-internet it washam radio and they were building
their own radios.
They went to Radio Shack andordered transistors by the pound
or something or kits, and thenham radio gave way to internet
(15:55):
stuff, or even in between, itgave way to coding on PCs,
without networks but stillwriting software.
And these days, whatever onemight think about the grifting
elements of Web3, a marketingterm and of cryptocurrencies and
computational blockchain andstuff like that, there are a lot
(16:18):
of people involved with that,not simply with name, your unit
of currency signs in their eyes,but because it feels like a
generative space in which theycan imagine and try to bring
into reality a different futureand thinking about where those
spaces are and should be and canbe.
And some are probably morefitting in the public interest
(16:42):
than others.
Some are more harnessing ofcooperative instincts than
others.
Think of Wikipedia as a greatexample of a generative space at
the content layer, for whichthe only thing that ultimately
powers it are people who areprepared to subscribe to the
ethos of Wikipedia and becomeeditors.
So having great places forfolks like that to meet one
(17:06):
another, build stuff, expressand self-govern.
This gets full circle to how you, I think, opened our
conversation Thinking aboutgovernance.
I think too often when we thinkof the word, it immediately
just becomes regulation.
There's a bunch of stuffhappening.
Some of it's going to be bad.
Government is there to protectus from bad things and in many
(17:28):
instances, in the ideal, itabsolutely is.
But if the things that arehappening are happening because
of private companies and wethink of them as kind of a
customer service issue, I'mgetting harassed online I'm
going to press the I've beenharassed button and come on,
already, fix it.
It is the responsibility ofcompanies making a ton of money
(17:50):
to create safe environments butat the same time who said this?
All had to be corporate anyway.
What environments can weimagine?
Have we seen, could we buildout that lets strangers who
share something in common,including a desire for discourse
, if they don't have anythingelse in common, what are the
(18:12):
technologies and practices thatcan bring them together and,
when they have a problem, figureout how to solve it through an
act of collectiveself-governance, which is
ultimately what we expect ofreal government, if it is a
democracy.
How to do that is what reallyinterests me.
And thinking about newinstitutions and institutional
(18:38):
relationships at a time when theway I've been thinking of it is
, first, we don't know what wewant, we can't agree on that,
and second, we don't trustanybody to give it to us.
That's the challenge ofgovernance today.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Unfortunately, we have to wrap up this discussion
about this huge topic that spansdecades, literally, but I do
want to ask you our last twoquestions, which are what books
have had an impact on you?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Well, one book was by a critic named Neil Postman in
the mid 90s and so he wasn'tthinking about internet stuff at
all called Technopoly, theSurrender of Culture to
Technology, and it has a littlebit of a vibe of get off my lawn
(19:29):
to it, but it was.
He was kind of beholding thephenomenon of cable television
and the many new stations andwhat they, in his view, were
gravitating towards, and lookingat the way that the technology
(19:49):
of cable TV was driving ourentire culture, in his view,
from a written one back to anoral one and what that meant.
And I mean it's prettymagisterial.
It talks about thousands ofyears ago going from an oral
culture to a written one, andwhile there's still plenty of
(20:10):
typing and reading today, whichis nominally writing, it's so
interesting to me how much ofhis sensibilities again thinking
about cable, not about internetapply to what we've got now,
including what it might be doingto our attention spans.
So I don't know, that's a kindof pessimistic sort of book, but
(20:34):
I think still one that has justaged really interestingly,
given that its subject matterhas evolved so much.
And another one I just mightflag was a collection of essays
called the Mind's Eye Letter IFantasies and Reflections on
Self and Soul by Douglas RHofstadter and Daniel Dennett
(20:58):
Folks who think about mind,brain and computation, and it
was written in the mid-80s andbecause it's a bunch of essays,
there's a lot of voices withinit.
They wrote openers and closers,little wrappers around the
essays, which is also just areally interesting way
pre-Twitter or other instantdiscourse mechanisms to again
(21:24):
get reaction and conversationinto things.
It was a neat meta piece to thebook.
You get to read the editor'sreactions to stuff along with
the stuff.
And again, how much things havechanged in the field of
artificial intelligence sincethe 80s when they were writing
it.
And it's just such a neatbracketing so that I guess it's
(21:47):
part of a larger project.
I feel I've got to not, as is sotempting and often driven to do
, look at new phenomenon in techas if a spaceship just dropped
them off and scooted away andit's like well now what this
thing happened.
Do we regulate it?
Is it legal?
What do we do?
But rather, thinking aboutwhere it has come from, where
(22:09):
it's at now and the multipledifferent places it could be
going, depending on choices thatpeople make, understanding that
the power of choice is lumpilydistributed, unfairly allocated,
that there's all sorts ofsocial and political power
layers to all this.
So those are two books I mightput forward as blasts from a
(22:30):
pretty recent but, in technologytimes, quite different past
that might have resonance today.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah, the other Neil Postman book that you always
hear about is amusing ourselvesto death.
I haven't read it, but it'sdefinitely one of those books
that it's on the list.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Once you tell somebody to get off their lawn,
you.
It is a font of any number ofbooks.
He also wrote a building abridge to the 19th century, the
end of education, which he meantas sort of a double entendre,
both the purpose and the end ofit.
And again, you know he was agrumpy guy, but he still kind of
(23:08):
had a twinkle in his eye too.
I was very lucky to at somepoint, when we started our
Berkman Klein Center forInternet and Society at the
university here, invited him upto give a talk.
He was kind of shocked.
It was weird.
It was as if nobody asked himto give talks.
He came up and gave a reallyinteresting talk now on the cusp
of the internet age.
This must have been 1996, 97,maybe 98.
(23:30):
And yeah, it was just a reallyinteresting time.
But yes, his entire oeuvremight be worth looking at.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah.
The last question is whatadvice do you have for teenagers
?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Well, first, just on behalf of Generation X, an
apology.
Just sorry, this wasn't on ourbingo card.
This wasn't how it was reallysupposed to be.
In the throes of at least myoptimism of the early aughts,
late 90s uh, including thecelebration of what the internet
(24:08):
and new tech could bring, um,you know, the seeds of
everything that would grow fromit were planted then.
They were there, and there werepeople then who saw it too, not
just like Neil Postman and Ithink it is an extraordinarily
(24:29):
more difficult proposition tonavigate a transition from
childhood to adulthood than itwas in prior generations.
And you know, at some pointyou're looking at Maslow's
hierarchy and you're like well,you know, you're not in a coal
mine at age six or something.
I get that.
But the way in which and again,I've got Neil Postman on the
(24:54):
brain, I don't normally butwe've been talking about him.
You know his end of childhood,or I said end of education, but
I think he also wrote somethingabout childhood and maybe it was
the end of childhood, and I'mconfusing the education and
childhood books.
Um, but uh, it's hard to be akid when there are no longer
(25:17):
natural boundaries to yourcontext.
I'm with my family.
Now what happens with my familypretty much stays with my
family.
I mean that in a good way.
There are obviously bad thingstoo that can happen, and when
I'm at school, I'm at school,and if there's a problem at
school, my school has to dealwith it.
(25:37):
And maybe they won't, but theyneed to, rather than everything
being one TikTok away from beingon everybody's mind and
everybody wanting to offer anopinion on it, and I think
there's a commoditization ofourselves and an implicit
competition of what we can offerfor views.
(25:57):
That is just really plays intoit's.
It's stuff that teenage rockand roll players who became
famous as rock and roll artistsas kids had to navigate as rock
stars, and it's like I thinkthere's so many more people now
(26:19):
that have to navigate that, andso, anyway, this is all an
apology.
What's my advice?
I guess the advice is to try tobuild a little bit of the
buffer that isn't naturallythere anymore to find the pond
you want to swim in, and notalways have it have to connect
(26:41):
to the entire ocean andhopefully it's a pond that you
really can feel at home in andbe your best self in and explore
what selves you want to be andexperience joy and fun rather
than stress.
And the wolf is at my heels,with the wolf either being
(27:03):
fellow kids, because they're notalways so nice to each other,
or the wolf is gosh.
If I don't line things up right, I'm gonna get off track and
you know I'm gonna be miserableand unsuccessful.
It's just a really big trip tolay on someone or to have
somebody put on themselves at anearly age.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Well, thank you so much, Professor Zitron, for
coming on the podcast.
I really enjoyed ourconversation.
I feel like we covered, ofcourse, the origins of the
internet and how it's kind ofevolved to today, as well as
where that's left us with youradvice section as a culture and
like the next generation.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Thank you, Taylor.
It's great to think about thesethings.
Thank you for prompting me todo them.
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