 is a California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering Hadoop Summit 2016. Brought to you by Hortonworks. Here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley for theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signals. Of course, we're here at the big data event, Hadoop Summit 2016. I have a special guest, celebrity now author of the best-selling book, Magical of Virginia. Magic and loss, rising on the best-seller list. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. You are my internet friend, and now you're my real life friend. You're my favorite Facebook friend that I just now met for the first time. Great to meet you. Exactly. We had never met, and now we, but we know each other, of course, intimately through the interwebs. So I've been following your writing, your times, and you were doing some stuff on Medium, and then you kind of advertised you're doing this book. I saw you do the Google Glasses experiment, and I think it was Brooklyn. I was so into Google Glass, and I will admit it, I fall for everything. I fell for VR and all its incarnations, and the Google Glass, it was like that thing that was supposed to put the internet, all voice activated, just put the internet always in front of your face. So I started wearing around in Brooklyn my prototype. I thought everyone would stop me and say how cool it was. In fact, they didn't think it was cool at all. New Yorkers, that's how they really feel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got a problem with that? Your book, Magic and Loss, is fantastic, and I think it really is good because Dan Lyons wrote Disrupted, which was fantastic, Dan Lyons, big fan of him and his work. But it really, it wasn't a parody, it was the rights for Silicon Valley, the show that's kind of taking that culture and made it mainstream. I have people call me up and say, hey, you live in Scalowelto, oh my God, do you live near the house? I'm like, it's on Newell, which is one of my cross streets, but the point is tech culture now is kind of, in a native, my youngest is 13, and we're an iPad generation for the youth, and we're from the generation where there was no cell phones, and I remember when Paige was with the big innovation and the internet. That's right, but I think when I'm telling you, I think I know I'm talking to a fellow traveler when I say that there was digital culture before the advent of the worldwide web in the early 90s. I'm sure you did too, got electronic games like crazy, I would get any Merlin or Simon or whatever that they introduced, and then I also dialed into a mainframe in the late 70s and the early 80s to play the computer, as we call it, we didn't even call it the internet. And the thing about the culture too was email was very monochrome screens, but again, clunky, but still connected, right? So we were that generation of putting that first training wheels on, and now it's supposed to be, so in the book your premise is there's magical things happening in the internet and art, countering the whole trolling, internet's bad. Well, recently someone asked me, how can the internet be art when Twitter is so angry? What do you think art is? This is art, art is emotional, art is powerful emotions represented in tranquility, and this is what you see on the internet all the time. Of course the id, of course our human id needs a place to live and call it Twitter for now. It used to be YouTube comments. But we are always taking the measure of something we've lost. I get the word lost from lossy compression, the engineering term, that how MP3 takes that big broad music signal and flattens it out, and something about listening to music on MP3, at least for me, made me feel a sense that I was grieving for something, I was missing something from my analog life. On the other hand, more than counterbalanced by the magic that I think we all experience on the internet, we wouldn't have a friendship if it weren't for social media and all kinds of other things and strange serendipity happens, not to mention artistic expression in the form of photography, film, design, poetry and music, which are the five chapters of the book. The book is fantastic. The convergence and connection of people, concepts, life with the internet digitally is interesting, right? So there's some loss with the MP3 great example, but have you found post-book new examples? I'm sure the internet culture geeks like me are like, wow, this is so awesome. There's a cultural aspect of it. The digital experience, we see it on dating sites, obviously, you see Snapchat and dating sites like Tinder and other hookups apps and real estate, everything being Uberized. What's the new things that's coming out? You must have some inbound. This may be controversial, but one thing I see happening is anti-digital culture, partly as an epiphenomenon, a side effect of digitization. We have a whole world of people who really wanna immerse themselves in things like live music, maker culture, things made by hand. Vinyl records. Vinyl records, which are selling more than ever in the days of the Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter, they sold less than they do now. The Rolling Stones makes a billion dollars touring a year. Would we ever have thought that at the genesis of the iPod when it seemed like recorded music, represented music and that MP3 thing that floated through our phones was all we needed? No, we wanna look in the faces of the Rolling Stones, get as close as we can to the way the music is actually made. And almost defiantly, and this is how the culture works, this is how youth culture works, reject, create experiences that cannot be digitized. And this is really more of a counter-culture movement on the over-saturation of digital maybe. Yes, yes, you see the first people to scale down from high-powered iPhones were youth going to flip phones. It's like the greatest, like the greatest- Retro-ho. It's like, it's punk, it's punk tech. It's punk tech, exactly. It's like, yeah, I'm gonna use these instruments, but if I break a string, who cares? I'm gonna use the simplest one. My mom made me use my iPhone. Exactly. Are we gonna have that? It's gonna be like, oh, look at you with your basic iPhone over there, and I've got my just hacked down, downscale, whatever. And you know what, I don't spend the weekends. I don't pick up my phone on the weekends. But there are interesting markets there, and interesting, for instance, the live phenomenon, I know that there's this new company by one of the founders of Netflix Movie Pass, which for a $30 subscription, you see movies in the theater as much as you want, and the theaters are beautiful. And instead of Netflix and chill, the contemporary standard date, it's dinner and movie. You're out again, you're eating food, which can't be digitized in company, which can't be digitized, and then sitting in a theater, a public experience, which is a pretty extraordinary way that the culture and business pushes back on digitization. I remember I was at my undergraduate days in computer science in the 80s and before, when it was nerdy, and there was a sociology class that thought about computers and social change, and the big thing was, we're going to lose social interactions because of email. And if you think about what you're talking about here, is that the face-to-face presence, commitment of being with somebody, now is the scarce resource, you have an abundance of connections. I mean, take the fact, what has happened is, digital culture has jacked up the value of undigital culture. So for instance, you know, I have met on Facebook, we talk on Facebook Messenger, notice that we're, you know, like hindered spirits in a certain way, and we like each other's posts and so forth. Then we have a more extensive talk in Messenger, when we meet in person for the first time, both of us are East Coast people, but we hug, tell-up, because it's like, oh wow, like you in the flesh, you know, it's something exciting. Connection virtually. That's right. There's a synchronous connection, presence, but we're not really, we haven't met face-to-face, and we felt it. There's this great little experiment going on, so a group of kids in Silicon Valley have decided they're too addicted to their phones on Facebook. Now, I am not recommending, for your viewers and listeners, that anybody do what these kids do. It sounds good already, go ahead. All right, but what they do is take an LSD breakfast. Now, I don't take drugs, I think you can do this without the LSD, but they put a little bit of a hallucinogen under their skin in the morning, and what they find is they lost interest in the boring interface of their phones because people on the bus suddenly looked so fascinating to them. The human face is an incredible interface. It can't be reproduced anywhere, Steve, you know, Johnny Ive can't make it, they can't make it at Google, and that I think is something we will see young markets doing, which is this renewed appreciation for nature. And analog. For human and for analog culture, that's right. The Navy is going to sextance and compasses, you may have seen, training their, training sailors on those devices because of the fear that GPS might be hacked. So, you know. And the young kids probably don't even know what a compass is. Well, I bought myself a compass recently because I suddenly was like, you know, we talk a lot about digital technology, but what the heck? This thing can point toward the poles right in my hands. You know, I was suddenly like, we are this floating ball with these poles with different magnetic charges, and I think it's time I appreciated that. Okay, so I got to ask the feedback that you got from the book. Again, we hear the Virginia of Magic and Lost. Great, great book. Go buy, it's fantastic. Open your mind up. It's a thought provoking, but really specific good use cases. I got to think that, you know, when you talk at Google, when you talk to some of the groups that you're talking to, book clubs and other online, that there must be like, oh my God, you hit the cultural nerve. What have you heard from some of these folks from my age 50 down to the 20-something year olds? Have you had any aha moments where you said, oh my God, I hit a nerve here? I did not want to, I mean, I didn't want to write one of those books that's like the one thing you need to know to get your startup to succeed or whatever. You know, I was at the airport and every single one of them is like, pop, the only thing you need to do to save this or whatever. And they do take a very short view. Now, if you're thinking about, you know, whether, if you're thinking about your quarterly return, you know, what is your gonna do this quarter and when you're gonna be profitable or user acquisition, those books are good manuals. If you're gonna buy a hardcover book and you're gonna really invest in reading every page, not just the bolded part, not just the two points that you have to know. I really wanted readers and what I had found on the internet, people like you, we have an interest in a long view, you know, and I mean a really long view. Written in a prose that's not a listicle or, you know, short sentences. Like it's just a thought-provoking, but somebody can go, hey, you know, at the beach, on the weekend, say, hey, wow, this is really cool. What if, you know, we went to analog for a while or what if, what's best for my kids? Should I let my kids play multiplayer games more? Is that gonna simulate life? That was my, so these are the kinds of questions that the digital parents are asking. Yeah, so, you know, like, let's take the parents question, which is, you know, surprisingly, to me it's a surprisingly pressing question. I am a parent, but my kids' digital habits are not, you know, of obsessive interest to me. Sometimes I think the worry about our kids is a proxy for how we worry about ourselves. You know, it's funny because they're, you know, the model of the parents saying, my kid has attention deficit disorder, my kid has attention deficit disorder, the kid's over here, the parent's here, you know. Who has the attention deficit disorder? But in any case, I have realized that parents are talking about computers on the internet as though something kids have to have a very ambivalent relationship with and a very wary relationship with. So limit the time, and so it sounds a little bit like the abstinence movement around sexuality. That, like, you know, you only dip in, it's very, you know, they're on the date. Caboob, blah, blah, blah. Right, right, right. Instead of joining sides with their kids and helping to create a durable, powerful, interesting online avatar, which is what kids want to do and it's also what we want to do. So, like, in your Facebook profile, there are all kinds of strategic moves you can make as a creator of that profile. We know it as adults. Like, do you, some people put up pictures of their kids, some people don't, vacation pictures, some people promote the heck out of themselves, some people don't do so much of that. Do you put up a lot of photographs, do you, whatever? Those are the decisions we started to make when we went on Facebook, and kids are making them too. Yeah, what armor to have on their gaming profile. What kind of, how they want to play, you know. Second life, are you going to wear feathers? You know, these are important things. But the, you know, small questions like talking to your kids, and I don't mean a touchy-feely conversation, but literally, you're going to write in all lowercase, commit. You know, you write in all lowercase, you're cute, and you're this, and that means a certain thing, and you should get it, and you're going to write in all caps, and you're going to talk about white nationalist ideology. Well, that also has a set of consequences. What have you learned in terms of the virtual space? Obviously, augmented reality, virtual reality, these promise to be virtual spaces. What does, what does, they always hope to replicate the real world? I mean, will there be any parallels of the kind of commitment in the moment gives you? One thing I say, because the, you know, the subtitle of the book is the internet as art, magic and loss, the internet as art, and the kind of art the internet is, is what I think of as realist art. It purports to be reality. You know, every technology, think of photography, film, sets, or think of even the introduction of a third dimension in painting, you know, in Renaissance painting perspective, purports to represent reality better than it's been represented before. And if you're right in sync with the technology, you're typically fooled by it. I mean, this is a seductive representation of reality. You know, people watching us now believe they're seeing us, flesh and blood us, talk. You know, they don't think they're seeing pixels that are designed in certain ways and certainly in certain ways. So, trying to sort out the incredibly interesting, immersive, artful experience of being online that has some dangers and has some emotions to it, from real life is a really important thing. You know, for us to learn first and then to model for our kids. So, I had a horrible day on Twitter one day. 2012, 2013, worst day ever on Twitter. It was a great day for me. I spent the day at the beach. My Twitter avatar took sniper fire for me all day. People called her an idiot. You separated them out. I separated them out. And anyone who likes role-playing games knows that I'm not a high priestess in Genshin's and Dragons. I'm a much smaller person than that. And in the case of this Twitter battle, I'm a less embattled person than the one that takes sniper fire for me on Twitter. That's my armor. That's your armor. So, let's talk about poetry and Twitter. You mentioned poetry, Twitter, 140 characters. 140 characters is a lot, if a lot of internet users, you're used to pictographic language like Chinese. So, 140 characters is a novel. Well, not a novel, but it's a short story for a writer of short-form Chinese aphorisms like Confucius. So, one of the things I wanted to say is there's nothing about it being short that makes it a little culture. I mean, it takes a second to take in a sculpture or to take in a painting. And yet, the amount of craft that went into that might be much more. Good tweeting and you're excellent at it is not easy. I know that many times I've been like, I tagged the wrong person and then I have to delete it because the name didn't come up or I get the hashtags wrong and then I'm like, oh, it would've been better this other way. Or I don't have a smart enough introduction to a really- It's like playing sports. Twitter's like firing at the tennis ball, baseline rallies with people. I mean, it's like there's a cultural thing. And this is the thing that I love about your book is you really bring in the metaphors around art and the cultural aspect. Have you found that this one art period that we represent right now as it could be a comparison? Interesting. I mean, it's always tempting to compare everything to the Renaissance, but obviously in the Italian Renaissance there was so much technological innovation and so much artistic innovation. But the other thing, it might be bigger than that, which it sounds grandiose, but we're talking about something that nearly six billion people use and have access to. So we're talking about something bigger than we've ever seen is the dawn of a civilization. So we pay a lot of attention to the aqueduct syndrome and later paid attention to the frescoes. I attend in this book to the frescoes, to the sculpture, to the music, to the art. So instead of talking about frescoes as an art historian might, I talk about Instagram. Yeah, and this thing's all weaved together because again, back to the global fabric. Amazing. If you look at the civilization as, I think you don't have to use the world as flat kind of metaphor, but that book kind of brings out that notion of, okay, if you just say a one global fabric, you have poetry, you have photography. I was talking with John, he says, they're gonna add in London, he says, cricket is a sport in England, a bug and a delicacy. Depending on where in the world you are. I love that. Is that, I wonder if that's the HSBC ad. They've done actually a beautiful, HSBC job has done a beautiful campaign. I should find out who did it about perspective. And that is also a wonderful way to think about the internet because I know a lot of people who don't like Twitter, who don't like YouTube comments, I do like them because I am perpetually surprised at what people bring to their interpretation. The crowdsourcing insights in the comments can be revealing, you know? You don't want to get your feelings hurt. Sometimes you don't want that much exposure to the micro flora and fauna of ideas that could be frightening. But when you're up for it, it's a really nice test of your immune system, you know? All right, so what's next for you, Virginia Heverden and Magic and Lost Great Book? I think I will continue to write Tech Criticism, which is just this growing field. Sarah Watson had a wonderful piece today in the Columbia Journalism Review about how we really need to bring all our faculties to Tech Criticism and treating tech with care and with proper awe. And the next book is on anti-digital culture. I will continue to write Journalism and you'll see little previews of that book in the next book. You're super inspirational and I think the culture needs this kind of rallying cry because, you know, there is art and science in all this beauty and beauty in the internet and it's not about mutually exclusive analog world. You can look and take and come offline. So it's interesting case study of this revolution. I think, and I think the counterculture, if you go back and I saw John Markoff about this when he wrote his first book, The Doormouse One, about the counterculture in Silicon Valley is, what's the great book? I mean, countercultures usually create another wave of innovation. So the question that comes out of this one is, this could be a seminal moment in history. I mean, I think it absolutely is, you know, in some ways every moment is a great moment if you know what to make of it. But I am just tired of people telling us that we're ruining our brands and that this is the end of innovation and that we're at some low period. I think we will look back and think of this as an incredibly fertile time for our imaginations if we don't lose hope. If we keep our creativity fired and if we commit to this incredible period we're in. Virginia, thanks for spending the time here on theCUBE. We appreciate it. We're live at Silicon Valley. This is theCUBE with author Virginia Hebron and Magic and Laws, great book. Get it if you don't have it. Hard copy is still available. Get it, we'll be right back with more live coverage. Here, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back with more at this short break.