3/15/2004 02:08:00 PM

March 15, 2004
Howard Rheingold
Mobile Communication, Pervasive Computing, and Collective Action

my notes and interpolations:

- Howard Rheingold is being introduced at the moment.

- Howard wants the house lights up. He has no PowerPoint. He is not providing a picture of the future, but a lens to bring things into focus.

- Howard is starting with a call to action: We are living in and benefiting from a common wealth in which individuals are able to contribute to and borrow from things given for the benefit of all. That commonwealth is under attack: enclosed, privatized, censored, metered and sold back to us. Extension of copyright into where it does not belong... digital rights management -- trusted computing... compromising end-to-end principal of the Internet... the innate right to innovate... the regulation of spectrum according to the laws and practices of the 1920s (applause).

- There are two ways to resist: one of them is to fight back. EFF is doing this legally and culturally. They need two to three orders of magnitude more lawyers out fighting for us.

- There is another away as well: we can create new commonwealth. We can create it faster than it is being ripped off.

- Characteristics of the new commonwealth: open, self-organizing, enable groups to form within, self-documenting, foundational--enabling others to build on it.

- Finnish call mobile phones: little hand.

- Collective action is the important message coming from the technology.

- clue: PCs became a wide phenomenon when the cost came down to the monthly salary in the lower end of the middle class in the US. The computational "phones" will be at this level globally (~$50/month) in the next seven years.

- people unable to derive economic benefits from previous revolutions will be able to this time. more people will also be able to make mischief with such tools.

- we carry the new devices. this is a break through. our tech is untethered and colonizing our social spaces in ways we have not yet known.

- the users created the applications that made the PC a revolution. the early PC luminaries where drop out kids who took geek toys and made them ubiquitous platforms (Gates, Jobs, et al).

- collectivism is central control... collective action is distributed commons-empowered authority... the most Federal governments are collectivism... stock markets are often collective actions...

- collective action dilemma... we are self-interested by default (we want to live and we want to have our children live....) - how to give up some protection to have a common trust to do things together.

- a maxim from some hunter-gathering people (?): "the best place to store the extra meat from today's hunt is in my neighbor's belly."

- Alphabetic writing grew out of a need to create records for the empire. With literacy came new means of existence. Forms of collective action became more widely possible with this literacy. Methodologies come with ways of eating, knowing, writing... social arrangements, enterprises and agreements are needed for new social forms. (random, semi-related comment: there is no progress--there is perspective and difference.)

- we can do some things with our rationalism, but it is not inherently better than being a hunter-gatherer.

- Napster: 70 million people, more people than voted for the President of the US, collectively acted to bring a sharing system into existence... Napster model: provisioning the very resource that you are pillaging while you are doing so.

- Seti@Home - 20 teraflops of distributed computation... more than any government can afford to put into a budget... cf: Folding @ standford.edu

- we do not really know what we can do with billions of devices linked to broadband speeds. we will find out about it, but we do not know yet.

- ebay is a market that should not exist... it is the classic prisoner dilemma... Works because of a very simple, somewhat gameable, reputation system... an existent proof of the functional use of mediated reputation

- what could we do walking around with a reputation system? the people we walk around with... some of them have common cause with us, but we do not know.

- the problem with rep systems is that only geeks change defaults... we need implicit information that we can make judgments from

- the ability to coordinate and to find common cause with people goes far beyond selling your bike or finding a date.

- manipulation and disinformation is a reality as well: the Nigerian riots re: Miss World were SMS-message encouraged....

- End-to-End was once guaranteed technologically by the routers... now bits are filtered by some Cable companies... if this continues and plays out the Internet will become Balkanized.

- The vested interests have gotten very smart about trying to legislate privilege for their proprietary monetization schemes. yes, give money and support the groups like EFF fighting this, but also invent new systems.

- 8086 processor can now be purchased for under $10 on a platform that is 1/5 of an inch. They are getting smaller and diving below one cent in cost. throw out enough of these with sensors and you have pervasive computing. small enough and they can be ingested. for better or for worse and probably for the worse as it is very difficult to undo something that have trillions of components that you cannot see.

- a world in which nothing works and nobody knows why. a world in which control is hidden, felt, but not directly recognized.

- there are people dieing in Africa over the parts that go into our mobile phones... there is a responsibility issue here.

- "The role of the state is to enable the market to destroy itself."

- "Marketing is important."

- emotions have to do with regulating cooperation... anger enables us to regulate free riding... etc etc. there is knowledge out there is that is silos in particular disciplines that needs to come together... Howard is doing this in the realm of collective action. He wants to see a wikipedia of collective action/cooperation. He is looking for some funding for his research. He wants to see open source science. The privatization of science is a danger.

- he wants to create a discipline of cooperation. you cannot create a discipline without peer-review and publishing, but he wants to have voices not be limited to the established academy. genetics languished for 50 years because Mendel was outside of academic circles.

- the more indisciplinary you are the more you have at risk...

___________________

Thoughts:

--> we need to go in the direction of mesh networking... trying to eliminate, as much as possible, centralized infrastructures in all fields. a world in which the bits of my call go to the devices closest to me and if not for them are passed on into the network until hitting the recipient. mesh networking also has social ramifications for how people pattern their existence ideologically.

--> Theologies of Cooperation and Collective Action