Technology Is Something to Make the World a Better Place

Adolfo Plasencia:

Tim, you have long been known among information technology (IT) specialists as the best IT book editor in the world, but you have also done other outstandingly relevant things in the digital culture.

For instance, yours is the creation of the truly commercial website, described as “the surfing site of O’Reilly’s Global Net” (Global Network Navigator.GNN), which was sold to America Online in September 1995. You created a great uproar on the net, in the middle of the euphoria over the dot-com boom, in year 2000, with your open letter to Jeff Bezos, in which you criticized him for his Amazon 1-click patent, a letter that gathered 10,000 support signatures in just four days.¹ You have belonged to the Internet Society Council and to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, together with John Perry Barlow and others. You started O’Reilly Media, which organizes seminars that position themselves more in the future than in the present. During one of those seminars, the term “Web 2.0” was coined. This term conceptually defines and identifies the second Internet generation. The word “editor” is not enough to explain what you do. On the net and in the mass media they systematically call you a guru, a word I am not sure you like.

I’d prefer you tell us how we could explain to the public who you are and what you do, as I don’t think any profession has yet been invented with a name that fits your huge range of activities.

Tim O’Reilly:

That’s a big list you gave me there! I would say, first of all, when I think about my company—let me talk about my company first, rather than just myself—we started out as a book publisher, and then we started doing online publishing and conferences, and somewhere along the line we realized that through all those vehicles we were actually doing something very, very different. The way we describe it to ourselves in our company mission statement is “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.” We look for people who are creating disruptive innovations. These are usually people from outside the business mainstream, whether hackers or inventors, open-source software developers, or people who are technology innovators. Then we try to help other people follow in their footsteps, whether that’s by documenting, in the form of books, information about their work, or bringing people together at conferences or other events, and also describing to the world what’s important about it. So that’s really our mission, and then everything we do as a business is just a vehicle for that mission.

As for myself, I would say that I started out as a writer living out a fabulous quote about writing that so shaped my thinking. Edwin Schlossberg said many years ago: “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”² And that’s what I have always tried to do. I apply a sort of pattern recognition and then try to reframe issues in ways that help people understand them differently.

A very good example of this was when we originally brought together the group at the meeting that came to be known as the “Open Source Summit,” because that was the meeting where the term open-source software was voted on and agreed on by these free-software leaders. Up to that time, a lot of these people had never met, and they didn’t think of themselves as part of the same movement, and yet we were able to bring them together, and then they were able to see what they had in common and to embrace this new idea with a new name.

There’s something really important in this story. Up to that time, there was a lot of focus on Linux and the Free Software Foundation’s Gnu Project, but no one had really made the connection that the Internet was also based on free software. By bringing Apache, sendmail, and the domain name system into the same conceptual map as Linux I was able to help transform the narrative from one of rebellion against the old order of the industry into one that showed how open-source software was enabling the next stage of the industry. The stories we tell each other shape how we think.

I’m also an activist. I believe that the choices we make matter, that technology is not neutral. Technology has enormous power for good or evil and we, as consumers of technology, have to make the choices that will help it serve us and make the world a better place. So, like people who are activists in other areas, I am somebody who wants to make the world a better place.

A.P.:

Do you think it’s possible to reach a permanent or durable consensus in a world with such a global diversity as that of open knowledge?

Do you think that by means of open collaborative processes on the Web, agreements can be reached and standards can be established and stabilized?

T.O.:

First of all, I believe that change is good. But there is a difference between permanent knowledge and standards. Standards are agreements, and in fact the most important standards are very, very simple. If you look at the Internet, the reason why it took off was because they agreed on as little as possible.

There’s a fabulous concept, which is actually I believe originally in RFC 861, which was the request for proposal concerning the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) by Jon Postel, who’s one of the real fathers of the Internet. He wrote something that sounds a lot like the golden rule from the Bible: “Be conservative in what you put out and be liberal in what you accept from others.” And that kind of simple rule of how do you connect, how do you connect well, was enormously powerful.

On the other hand, you had all of the big standards committees coming together around what was called the OSI stack, the open standards interconnect. They specified all kinds of technical details for how everything would connect. And which of those two standards won? It was the simpler one. Therefore, I think that a lot of the details we fight over are very small. In fact, there’s a wonderful poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in which he says something like, “What we fight with is so small and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated decisively by successively greater things.”

I really believe that the challenges we face are, How do we be open to a future? How do we allow new things to happen? And that means we won’t agree on everything, but, for example, leaving room for disagreement while understanding where we need to agree in order to allow the future to happen, that’s what is important.

I think I’ve been quoting too much here, but there is a wonderful passage from Laozi, the Chinese philosopher, who said: “Losing the way of life, men rely on goodness. Losing goodness, they rely on laws.” And in that hierarchy I like to think that first of all, what we really want to find with open source or Internet standards is what Laozi would call “the way of life,” which is: What’s the real way that things work? What makes for optimum results? As I’ve often said, that’s science; that’s not religion, that’s not politics. It’s understanding what is effective. For example, when I’ve tried to work with Web 2.0, it’s not about trying to advocate for a particular set of beliefs; it’s trying to understand what is effective. And in that hierarchy there’s a set of values. I believe that the values of open source are a lot about trusting people and relying on goodness. Wikipedia does that, and only when that fails do you want to go down and say, “You know, here there are some restrictions.”

But I’d much rather appeal to the goodness in people and, even more than that, appeal to the way things work.

A.P.:

One of the complaints about the world of technology is that the industry forces user knowledge (and their intellectual work in the form of digital files) to become almost immediately obsolete. Their reason is that there is no other alternative but to constantly and rapidly update the contents because of Moore’s law. People from a humanistic background, whom you know well, are especially unhappy, as your Harvard thesis dealt with the classic tension between the mythic and the rational in the dialogues of Plato.

Is this true? Is there no other alternative to this tyranny of constant upgrading and obsolescence?

Is digital nature really like that, or is a hoax perpetrated by the technology industry to keep users captive and hooked?

T.O.:

As I said earlier, I believe that change is natural and good. And I think there is a stress in modern life from the pace of change, and certainly there are people throughout history who have looked back to times when in theory, at least, the world was more stable and peaceful. If you want to be stable and peaceful, you can opt out of a technology society. There’s nothing stopping you from doing so. However, I actually think that the excitement of having to come to grips with the future is a good thing. For me, it’s a fabulous intellectual challenge. Every day there is something new; I’m always being surprised by the inventions of other people. It’s a wonderful artistic world that we live in. I go back to speaking of art! The wonderful poet Wallace Stevens talked a lot about a future in which we’re all trying to persuade each other of truths that are not necessarily even true but are aesthetic visions of possible futures.

There’s a way that Moore’s law certainly makes new things possible. But, I don’t think that it changes the fact that we as human beings need to be responsive. When we stop responding, we grow old, we die. And I’d much rather be facing the challenges of Moore’s law than, for example, the challenges of global warming, but we’re going to have to do that too! We live in a dynamic system and we should be grateful that we have the ability to respond.

A.P.:

Let’s carry on in the same vein, but now I am talking to O’Reilly the editor. I don’t know whether you know about the Long Now Foundation, which approaches projects and reflections on a long-term basis, in some cases up to ten thousand years. The Library of Alexandria was created with a vision and a time horizon of up to seven thousand years. If it had not been deliberately destroyed in a fire, it might still be running today, with its mission and vision still in force.

Couldn’t the digitally stored memory of humankind be approached using this same philosophy? Would the content usage and storage tools used in IT prevent this, or are we the ones who are incapable, in this digital era, of contemplating a cultural perspective of thousands of years, as the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman people of the Classical era did?

T.O.:

I just want to say that people like Brewster Kahle, of the Internet Archive, who in a way is really the modern heir to the librarians of Alexandria and who has worked with the Egyptian government to begin work there on a new digital Library of Alexandria, is one of my heroes. I’ve actually been a sponsor of events for the Long Now Foundation, and I work with them.

I believe that having a long-term perspective is very, very important.

As I said, we need to be responsive to our immediate environment, but a big part of that is thinking about consequences. We make choices, and often the consequences are not visible to us for a long time. I do think, on the one hand, though, that remembering everything is overrated. Part of what it is to be human is to forget, and if we had all accumulated knowledge, would we really use it? For example, even in the forgetting there is often new finding.

A very good example of that is the wonderful Classical statuary that we so admire, the white marble Greek statues. Originally they were all painted! So these visions that were remade in the Renaissance of what Classical antiquity was all about were wrong! But they were beautiful nonetheless. And they were beautiful because of what we had forgotten. It’s like music. If it were all there, all the same, it wouldn’t be music. I think that we live in a constant tension with memory and possibility, and we need to be sympathetic. Yes, it’s sad when things are lost, but in some ways I think that one of the reasons we grow old is because we cannot forget.

Being able to forget and being able to start anew is an important part of being human.

A.P.:

Tim, how could we briefly explain to a normal reader what the concept and essence of Web 2.0 is, the Web 2.0 that you formulated in a seminal paper in 2005?³

T.O.:

Web 2.0 is a convenient name for a phenomenon that has been happening for quite some time. I’ve actually being talking about it probably for the better part of a decade. I just was calling it different things.

What I have been seeing is a shift, whereby the Internet is moving from being a sort of add-on to the PC to becoming the real platform.

In 2004 we decided to launch a conference that was really about a small idea, which was just that despite the dot-com bust, the Web wasn’t over, that it was coming back. So we called it the “Web 2.0 Conference.” But then, as we started to ask ourselves “What does that mean?,” we started to explain what it meant in terms of this vision of the future Internet as platform, the Internet operating system, and really the rules for what made for success on this new platform. And there are probably four or five that I’ve talked about a lot. But the first one is that in the era of the network and the network as platform, network effects are what matter. So you could frame Web 2.0 as the creation of applications that use network effects, particularly harnessing their users and user contributions, in fact, harnessing collective intelligence, so that they get better the more people use them. That aspect of Web 2.0—that these are applications that connect people via computers to applications, and then harness the activity of all those users so that the applications improve—is, I think, the heart of Web 2.0.

There is a set of corollaries to that. For example, one is that you have to be open and networked, and so share data, so that the data sharing makes your application work well with others and become transparent and the like. However, in that openness are the seeds of the next closing. Because I really believe that technology goes through waves of open innovation and then consolidation and closing down.

One of the things that are really interesting to me about Web 2.0 is that when you have network effects, you actually have increasing returns to the players who first generate those network effects. Take eBay, for example. For a long time it was very hard for other players to enter the auction marketplace because once eBay had a critical mass of buyers and sellers, why would you want to go somewhere else? Similarly, if you look at Amazon, they’ve gotten stronger and stronger because they were really good at harnessing user contribution. We’re seeing that with Google, where Google is just becoming better and better because they’ve done a better job than their competitors at harnessing their users to make their search results better, and to make their advertising network better.

This will likely lead to a period of consolidation, but of course, innovation will break out again in some new area.

A.P.:

In a text you wrote, titled “The Open Source Paradigm Shift,” you outlined the concept of paradigm, which Thomas Kuhn developed in his pioneering book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.⁴

According to WorldWideWebSize, at present, the indexed Web contains at least 4.71 billion pages. Now, a decade after your pioneering formulation of Web 2.0, we are clearly undergoing an enormous creative boom on a global scale of the network effects, which you have outlined, with technologies, concepts, and new meanings generated by social media (Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, Google+, Whatsapp, GitHub, the universe of mobile Internet apps; Kickstarter), which are all based on the concepts you formulated about the second generation in the meme of your seminal article, “What Is Web 2.0,” published in September 2005.⁵

Bearing in mind the concept of your text that was mentioned at the beginning, could it be argued that during the decade of Web 2.0 there has been a paradigm shift in the Internet in line with or on the scale of those described by Kuhn?

T.O.:

If by “paradigm shift,” we mean a fundamental change in assumptions, absolutely. When I wrote that piece, we were still in the PC era. That was an era characterized by Microsoft Windows as a de facto standard. Commodity software was shipped every couple of years, and didn’t change in the interim. We’re now in an era where software changes many times a day, imperceptibly. New features are tested on users and changed based on the data that are gathered about whether and how they use them. It’s all running on the Internet in one way or another, and the rules are completely different. The companies that were the first to understand the new rules gained enormous competitive advantage.

A.P.:

Tim, do you think the Internet is going to evolve with a succession of new generations in the future of different kinds of Internet: the Semantic Web; the Mobile Web (Ubiquitous Internet); the Internet of Everything or the Internet of Things (which you say we should call “the Internet of Things and Humans”), and so on?

Will the definitive Web ever arrive, or can the same observation that Jimmy Wales applied to Wikipedia be applied to the Internet and the Web: “The Internet will always be something that is unfinished, incomplete”?⁶

T.O.:

Yes, of course: the Internet will continue to arrive, like all products of human culture.

A.P.:

Big data is one of the cutting-edge technologies of the day. As you have said, technology can be used for good or for bad. In Europe, a huge controversy has been stirred up concerning the widescale espionage carried out by the NSA, following Edward Snowden’s revelations.

You have written a paper called “The Creep Factor: How to Think about Big Data and Privacy.”⁷

However, with all that is going on, do you not think that, in certain circles, the expression “big data and privacy” has become an oxymoron?

T.O.:

Expectations of privacy have changed many times over the years. And usually, when new technologies move the goalposts in some way, it takes some time to establish what the new social norms ought to be. Often there are landmark legal cases decades after a new technology emerges. That will happen here too. In the meantime, though, I urge companies to be thoughtful about what they do with data they gather or purchase. Is the data being used on behalf of the customer or against the customer? That is the key question. When companies or governments use our data against us, we are rightfully outraged. When they use it to make things better for us, that’s a powerful tool to increase our loyalty and satisfaction.

A.P.:

Since you have said that technology can also be used for the better, let’s think positively:

I’m going to ask you three questions, which are really one:

Do you think the universe of the great “connected brain” of the Web and its technological evolution—which, as you have said, benefits from collective intelligence—could finally turn out to be the “cement” or binding agent that leads us back to a period of understanding human knowledge as a “whole”—as it was, for instance, in ancient Greece and Alexandria, as well as during the pre-Renaissance efforts in Bologna concerning the trivium and quadrivium = Unus-Versus-Alia = university?

Could the cybernetics of the Web work as a binding agent for breaking down barriers, which are sometimes unfathomable, referred to by C. P. Snow, which still separate the arts and humanities from the sciences and their useful applications?

In other words, do you see the global Web as an instrument for bringing together, or merging disciplines, which urge us, with a more highly interwoven knowledge, to progress toward a better human condition in the near future?

T.O.:

That’s a tough question. On the one hand, there is no going back to the days when a learned individual could have read most of books that mattered, and perhaps own most of them in a library that would fit in a room or two. At the same time, in every era, there is some amount of canonical knowledge. STEM (or STEAM) is the new trivium today, and it’s just as flawed. The most interesting people depart from the canon. All of our great cultural heroes are people who went beyond the boundaries of knowledge or practice in their day. Their artistic transgressions or scientific discoveries eventually became part of the new canon. So let’s hear it for the explorers, the rule breakers, those who heed Ezra Pound’s advice to “Make it new!”

19 Technology Is Something to Make the World a Better Place

Notes