 My distinct honor and privilege to moderate tonight's conversation with two of the authors of the CluTrain Manifesto, David Weiberger and Doc Searle, and among all of you for which it's an incredible brain trust in the room and eager to open it up as quickly as possible. Let's just take a little, how many people have read the CluTrain Manifesto? Wow. Now maybe I could stop from a defined read. There's a kind of read that is the back of the book and kind of flipping through and then maybe looking at the Wikipedia page or read a review of the book. How many people have done that, at least? Okay, how many people have actually read the book the way we meant read in the 20th century? Still a lot of people, for those of you in Cyberland, to say they've done it, so it's gonna be a very in-depth conversation, but for those who haven't help us out. First, paint the scene ten years ago. What did it look like as you were gathering together to actually pen a Manifesto raging with, I don't know, a cocaine-fueled late-night kitchen in the writer's room? Against what were you raging? What was the situation ten years ago? I think that the main thing, at least for me, was that the net was not well understood, that the net, and I think the net is still, to some degree, not understood, or you wouldn't have written your book, you know, The Future of the Internet and how to stop it. So there's that's still there. There's some misunderstanding of the net. There's parts of it that I don't think we fully knew even what we were saying, even though we said it. So, for example, not long after the book came out, I was on a little show on an old TV network that's now gone with Jacob Nielsen, and afterwards he said, well, you know, you guys were marketers who defected from marketing and sided with markets against marketing, and pointed out that we were using the second person's voice against marketing, basically against the machine, as it were. We were saying you this and you that. And in fact, even the clue train, like, you don't have a clue, is a sort of, there's a kind of element of smugness to it. We were siding with buyers. We were siding with citizens. We were siding with society, with individuals. And for that matter, with companies that weren't necessarily that well funded. And we actually felt, the line that Galvin and I said for me, and I probably did for David as well, was one that Chris Locke sent out. It was a little gift that said, we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it. And I didn't realize until later when Jacob pointed that out that, you know, who is the we we're talking about? Who is it that our reach is exceeding your grasp? Who are we? Who are you? And we were ordinary folks, and you were the people misunderstanding it, and misunderstanding the net as well. And we felt that the net had enormous potential beyond just IPO scores. And that's basically what the play was for at the time. So I think to answer your question, the crash deterrence, some of that. And the net has in fact completely changed a great many things. I don't think any of us would give it up at this point. I think that there, I mean, if you were to, you know, take any one of us from even 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, and put us in now, we would say this is kind of utopian. You know, we have a lot more, you know, we're getting the net on our phones. We're getting it, you know, through data cards. It is relatively ubiquitous. It is highly available in a lot of places. It now is undermining the phone system. The phone companies that we hated are kind of blowing up their institutions. They're like newspapers that are kind of collapsing. We're seeing some consequences there. But it's been terribly disruptive, and goodly disruptive, too, I suppose. And I guess part of dividing the world a little bit into them and us, with the us and the we, the people being the former little guy that had been perceived by those in power as mere eyeballs, or things that could be easily manipulated. And I think that's the key for standing there, not wanting to be shorn anymore. How does this fit into your view about authenticity? That somehow there's something real about, this is the voice point. I know. David Groening. This is one of the things I think we were wrong about. So thanks a lot. Yeah. So I believe you mean that sincerely. So tell us. Oh, I do actually do. Yeah. So I think that I still think that the web is disruptive, exceptionally so. It's not simply another communications medium that this is the age of the web. And I still think it's as important as the age of the printing press. I mean, it's epically important. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But that's one of the premises of clue training is this is really, really important. There is this element of anger that you're pointing at. I'm going to get to your point second. I think this is one of the ways in which the clue train is dated. The tone of it is now angry middle-aged men who feel released from their upbringing, which was dominated by broadcast. And it's oppressive. Broadcast was an oppressive regime. Today's youth, the digital natives or whatever, don't have that. It's not an act of liberation to step into the internet. It's simply what is. So the angry tone of, obnoxious angry tone of, smug tone of clue train, which is very effective for it at the time, apparently, I think is now out of date. I don't think we would write it the same way anymore. The problem with authenticity is, this is a really, really hard point. And Chris used to say, and I suppose it still does, that corporations can't be authentic because they, well, I'll panel Chris, Locke, Rageboy, because they can't box. They don't have bodies. They're not real things there. And I think there is a strong element in your anti-unit scream. Not to be confused with the plural unit. So we sometimes, Doc and I sometimes are approached by happy, excited marketing people who say, oh, you call a clue train. I love that book. It's so important to me. And maybe tell us what they're doing as marketers and the blood drains from our faces. Oh, my God. Oh, no. This is like that cartoon. Becca, do you have the cartoon up? Yes, it is. It is like that cartoon. It's these social media for marketers. And how about if I deceive people authentically and, apparently, passionately? Yes. Yes. And severity is the most important thing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. So I want to say two things, both brief and contradictory. First is the notion of authenticity is extremely difficult and dangerous. It's difficult because corporations aren't people. It's dangerous because it can be used to make you feel good about what you're doing without having any substance. So there's a certain danger to authenticity. But authenticity also does capture something that we do want to capture when we talk about companies or people, which is there are times when we want to say about somebody that she or he or the company itself is completely authentic. They're lying, they're self-deceptive, whatever it is. It's a useful term, but there isn't a lot of metaphysics behind it when you start pulling it apart. So it makes me very nervous to hear authenticity raised because it is an important value in the truth in the clue train manifesto. Because I now think it's mainly just this sort of grab bag of stuff that doesn't resolve into anything real. And so it makes me nervous. I don't agree. I think that the, what we said about voice, and that was all David and Chris, I should say, and possibly Chris, especially, because he has such a distinctive one. To a large extent, the tone of clue train is Chris' tone. I think we're experimenting with that right now. I think what's happening with Twitter here, I think what's happening with, what's been happening with blogs since clue train came out, what's been happening with the web in general is texting for that matter. I don't know if it's authenticity, it's human. It's part of, and the net is inherently a human place. So let's take Twitter as a case study. I agree with all that. Okay. Yeah. Can I ask you something? Sure. So what's Procter & Gamble's authentic voice? I mean, that's the thing that I... Here's what I think. And this is, I think there is a place in the world for things that only the big companies can do. And I think that Procter & Gamble makes stuff that other companies can't make. I think what Peter Drucker said, you know, maybe 60 years ago, about in the long run, companies will exist at the grace of their employees and their customers. And that the customer will come to the center of the corporate stage, is still inevitable and hasn't quite happened. I think a lot of what we were saying, what you said about Fort Business, which is I think one of the strongest things in the book, is true. I mean, I think what, you know, that Fort Business will be, is an obsolete conceit and regime that cannot survive in a world where everybody's connected with community. And just for those who haven't read the book, Fort Business. This is a... What's the luggage at the other end of that handle? So it's my handle. It's his handle. The idea is businesses that confuse themselves, building a business and building a fort, where the walls of the fort are intended to keep information away from customers. So the techniques, and Mark, it's in general. So the techniques that companies traditionally have used, they were the best and sometimes the only source of information about their products and their services. So they would collectively release information in order to control their partners, their customers, their employees. In the age of net, the walls are a mere mockery because we're all a mockery rule. There are basically no secrets. So you think you can't really cultivate a brand separate from the truth? Well, that's another thing that's wrong. It's like I thought Morningstar Farms was rolling hills and fake pigs walking around from which you make the fake bacon, right? That's how it happened. It's not? I don't know. In California cows can talk. So thesis number 70-something is... Forget about advertising. It doesn't work anymore. It's 74. Advertise it. Forget about it. It doesn't work. So told me wrong. But by advertising, maybe you just meant bladding out of a megaphone. That works really well. To a stadium full of people. But if by advertising what you... The counterpart, the replacement advertising 2.0 is the much more insidious, cultivated authenticity of the blogger who gets sent free equipment in an expectation that he'll review it or something. But they still get exposed. We don't know what they do though. We can't... It doesn't matter, really. It doesn't matter. I mean, if you sell out that cheap, so what? Or live with that? I mean, it doesn't... That doesn't concern me. What happens to companies does. I mean, there's... Companies now have to live in a world where there's zero distance from everybody. In fact, we all live in a world where if we're on the net we're all zero distance apart. And the cost of being able to communicate is very, very low. And that makes all the difference. There's a high cost to keeping information away from testimony. There's a high cost even to keeping information away from competitors because it can improve your market by regaining information off the competitors. And we're just beginning to learn there's no stuff that does need to be trade secrets. Some of them do have to be kept out. Publicly held company can't just... No, you... ...bear at stops in a live stream. No, but I'm not sure those are all at harvest. They do. I think there's an eBay blogger who does more or less. Yeah. No, that's fine. There absolutely are things that companies need to... by law or, in fact, actually need to keep secret. We have no problem with that. And we're both totally opposed. I'm going to speak for you now. Yeah. To the astroturfing and the suborning of bloggers that's just evil. That's subverting the most valuable social interaction we have, which he's talking with one another. So you shouldn't do that. And if you do, you should rot in hell. You know, that much is... That's the title of the sequel. Yeah. The problem with advertising is that there is a type of glaring advertisement that blurs over the megaphone at the football game that appeals to the lizard portion of your brain and absolutely works. Branding works in the sense that we do... Most of us still tend to think of the Toyota, Yaris as a young person in the car, because even if we're... And I still carry around jingles that I heard when I was five years old in 1955. There's not a medical procedure to get them out. I find that pinball wizard trumps all. That's amazing. You can use that. I can sing the Eastern Airlines jingle. You know, this is... That stuff does work, but we now have... I can finally remember it now. ...by Eastern number one to the sun. Wow. Wow. I remember it in Doris West. It's only been... The intervals are all wrong, but the general progression is correct. But we now have... And this is what people know. David was originally a musician. And Cluchin was right about this. It was deeply wrong about some other things as well, though, but it was deeply right that we do now have, as a market and as a culture, the ability to undo some of the damage that the mindless wizard brain advertising does to us. And we can fact check instantly. And when they show... We're thinking about getting a mini Cooper, because it's going to be so much fun to drive, but we're worried about Boston weather. We are not... This is for systems. Those old days, you had to rely upon a dealer. It may be a magazine that's defined one. I can tell you. Now you're the last person to ask you the dealer. How does this baby do in snow? The dealer's always going to say, oh, yeah, my wife drives one. All winter long, great. Pardon for the sexism. So now you're not going to do that. It's the dealer's sexism. Well, absolutely. So now you're going to go on the web and you're going to find out instantly from people in Boston that it does or it doesn't. And from there, you're happy if that's from TripAdvisor or from Kartalk or whatever your favorite forum is or maybe there's even an Amazon review of a car or something. Yes. Any end all. Any end all. Got it. Now, you had had a hook almost into the VRM stuff and I want to do a quick riff on that before that. I want to see Twitter as a quick case study because it is so much the flavor of the month right now. I'm curious to see the CluTrain principles applied to it. Is Twitter exactly what you were talking about? Powering the little guy in the immortal words of David Weinberger on the internet, everybody will be famous for 15 people. At least some people who want to tune in to what you're saying and they can do that and then they can retweet and they can retweet and stuff rises to the top. Or is it exactly the kind of modality that can be subverted by the forces against which you rail and there are such things now as Twitter brand managers that can tweet for you. Or there's what's it called, Twitter lead or something where you can pile up your tweets for the coming day and have them, you know, burped out at regular intervals. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how would you... I would say yes and no. I think it's very much CluTrain-esque in the sense that everybody can participate, everybody has a voice. You can tell the voices are authentic. Lots of invention, lots of unpredictability. You know, the hyperlink subvert hierarchy, which is one of David's lines. It was one of the... one of the feces in this. Where it's not is that it has... it's a silo. To some degree, it's a silo. One company is in the middle of it. One company is staying in the middle of it. A company with no apparent business model, is that true? Yeah, it's so far. But I'm not sure... I'm not sure getting continuous investment is not a business model. So, I mean... Really, I think it is a business model. So, there was... So much for the investors, but... Well, volume is how they really... Volume, exactly. First interstate bank. We make change. How do you make money? With volume, right? More change. You know, we just had that happen, didn't we? I suppose. The... Actually, there was a story that was told in the first edition of Crew Trainers, in the second one as well. That was pretty revealing. I was at this party, and there was a young guy who was on his third startup, and I recognized him, and I said, what are you doing? And he said, well, we're an arms merchant to the portals industry. And I said, well, there's a portals industry. That's an industry. He said, oh yeah, and we do this, and this, and this. And it was all bug words. And I finally asked him, but I thought it was a rude question. I said, how are sales? And he said, they're great. We just closed our second round of finance. That's $25 million. And it was like this light bulb went off. I said, oh, wait a minute. So every company has two markets. One for its goods and services, and the other for itself. And what happened in the dot com era is the second overcame the first. We had this whole market. There's nothing about selling your company. So Twitter's operating in that. And it's interesting that Evan Williams, who runs it, who's one of the founders of it, sold bloggers to Google. What's Google's business model on bloggers? Who knows? And at some point, they'll sell for some money to somebody who's going to make money on it. That's an awful lot like a pyramid scheme. Yeah, it probably is. I mean, everybody would like to have one of those, actually, and get out before it goes weird somehow. But it does perform a service. And I think everything, and this is sort of clue trading, too, that everything's a prototype. Still, everything's a prototype. And my wife Joyce is sitting over there. I just said once, and one of my favorite lines, which is, trees do not grow to the sky. This is not a tree. Twitter's not a tree that grows to the sky. It's not even a tree that stands for very long if you think it's being turned off all the time. And Google is neither. Google is not the end of times, and Microsoft wasn't before that, and IBM wasn't before that. You could prototype all kinds of stuff on the net as long as it remains open and generative. Got it. All right, so let's do a riff on VRM. Vendor relationship management. Turning on its head, the old-style CRM by which vendors try to treat their consumers as exactly the sheep-like, eyeball-like, little faithless molecules. Send them tailored email on their birthdays exactly for them. You're saying, no, let the consumers do that to the vendors. Right. We don't call it consumers either. There's a line we quoted from Jerry McCalsky that he said that a consumer is a duller that lives only to gulp products and crap cash, and that was in the first book, and he corrected you later saying that dullers would blow up the eyeballs. That made it in the second version, which is over there in the corner. So my new chapter, all four of the authors of my new chapter in the new edition deals with the subject of VRM, which is what I'm working on as a fellow at the Burton Center with something called Project VRM. VRM stands for vendor relationship management. It's the reciprocal of customer relationship management. CRM is what sends you junk mail. CRM is what organizes the call centers that you hate that when you call them, they're sending you off to someplace else. They're making bad guesses about what you want, and the building is turning that around, putting the pricing done in the hands of customers, putting the ability to issue a global preference in the hands of users, being able to change your address once for everybody that you deal with. Basically giving customers control over their interactions with sellers in the marketplace, and it's like everything else in the net. It's early, but it's something that we've been working on for three years now. The public radio tuner, which Keith Hopper is over there and some other people may be in the room too, having been working on some VRM stuff that's going to be showing up in that. How many people have a public radio tuner on an iPhone? Wow, not bad. For the record, maybe 40%? How many people have an iPhone? I'm just curious, in this crowd, wow, there's probably going to be some. Public radio, the Venn diagrams are building themselves in my head. The thing is that more and more control is passed over the hands of users, but we want to do is make sure that it's not just in the middle, where we have the best way of helping you relate. It's rather you as a tool for relating, and it's still early with that and really outlined that. Let's try some of this wisdom in the realm of politics. Do you think we've seen in the past 10 years some of the canon of the manifesto bear out in the political space? Yes. More? We're treating the witness as friendly. I don't know what your problem is. Barbara's law professor. Actually, one of the things I'm absolutely proudest about with the book is that Joe Trippi, who managed Howard Dean's campaigning, read it and actually was influential on him to some degree. That makes it very interesting. And therefore, the Obama campaign too, I would say. Well, yeah, sort of, yeah. Indirectly. So, you can... We always thought that the clue training was actually about the effect of the web with business as one example, and I think that there are actually a bunch of precepts, whatever, that apply easily to marketing and to politics since... Ever since 1968, I think, the book was written and I can't remember the name of it, that disclosed that in fact, politics was... Politicians were being treated like soap and the campaigns were just like marketing. We know that's the case, right? Politics and marketing have become one of the same things. So, to the extent to which the net change is the nature of marketing likewise to politics. So, in the case to... not as successfully, because politics and government is harder to change than business is, because business will change almost, you know, instantly if they see an opportunity to make money whereas in politics you're talking about longer-standing institutions, everything goes more slowly. Nevertheless, the way I understand the dean campaign, which I take as the formative one in this space, and to which you were a senior internet consultant. I had a very nice title, senior internet advisor that I overstated my role as a volunteer. But, yeah. Seriously, you know, you just went door to door. The basic idea of it as I understand it was you have a broadcast model in politics. You have a guy at the top who is broadcasting a message down to the troops and you try to enforce message discipline. This is exactly how marketers talk. The dean campaign wanted to undo that. You cannot do that by reversing the flow of the many up to the one, because Howard Dean is not going to read the 680,000 emails that he would get a day from the supporters that so many people had signed up on the site. So, the campaign had this breakthrough idea, which I think is really quite wonderful, which is, well, the way you do this, the way you scale it is by enabling conversations among the base of the pyramid. You do it laterally. Please think. And on the head, anybody, cohorts based around any set of interests. So, they actually set up a social networking site where you could go, you could register state your interests, form groups. There was a pilot for dean. There were educators for dean. There was even Howard for dean. I joined that. They were looking for a while. I don't know why. So, the essential idea of peer-to-peer conversation as empowering and important and human, and as a way of undoing the inter-middle structure as much as it can be done, that was, you do see that in politics more and more and more. We're coming to take it actually for granted, which is an amazing thing, just an amazing thing. And would you see that in the presidency right now? Do you think the executive branch of the United States has taken the time? Well, yeah, I think they do actually. I mean, I'm not saying they took clue frames, but I think they're taking the web ethos to heart. You can see this in lots of areas. What do you read from the fact that when they had the first policy quasi whiskey up, I think they used Google Moderator if people could vote stuff up and down. The top three policy priorities were marijuana legalization, the legalization of marijuana, and pot for all. So, is that... who's right there? Is it that that's actually the top priority? You referred to the net as near ubiquitous. And even... I'm going to look at, for example, Esther, hard to hide right there at the moment. Who at any moment could erupt into a ramp about the digital device. Or I would look at our good friend Ethan Zitterman, who actually could look at many people here, who are very persuasive on the point, even more to this point, that no matter how ubiquitous, say, Wi-Fi access becomes, and of course that is becoming more, the range of skills that are required to succeed with it is pretty vast and that device is still there, and the globally, it's extremely unevenly distributed as well. So, ubiquity is way, way too optimistic. Is that okay? Okay. Okay. But for politics, which is what Jay-Z was asking about, I was watching because I've been an editor for Linux Journal for 1996, one way or another, and interesting thing to be about the game campaign is when that was going on, things like voter rolls and stuff like that were very chaotic. They were on many, many different platforms. Most of them were proprietary. A lot of them were like FoxBases or ODD2 or some other thing like that. One of those old vizicals. That crap. Hi Dan. Dan Brickland, one of the co-creators of the Vizicals. More responsible for the internet revolution than perhaps somebody else used to. Thank you for that, Dan. We are all prisoners in your cells. No wonder. What rolling column are you? A1. C1. There are the features for you. That's why battleship. So the thing is that Drupal, for example, was young there, but things happened on Drupal in the game campaign that grew and got routinized and I think were actually contributed to the growth of Drupal but by the time four years later the Obama campaign came around, voter rolls were all unified across the country. And it wasn't just because the discipline was imposed above, that was partly it. It was also because there was a diaspora of geeks that came out of the game campaign and they were connected on the net. It was very clue training in that respect and the out of control nature of that actually served politics very well. And for a savvy politician like Obama, and he wasn't the only one, there was an awful lot that could be done both in the command and control way, but with the velvet gloves and also in the grassroots way, giving lots of ways for people to participate, or at least sensitive participating, it certainly gives money to the game campaign. Now we should have our medium and our message overlap. It'd be a little weird if we went on too long, up at the front about the importance of grassroots participation. So let's start easing in to the brain troughs and let's see if people want to jump in. Please indicate and feel free to say what's on your mind and if you like to say who you are or draw from all the stuff that's coming in either from you or from outside these walls online in various ways. Sir, tell us who you are. My name is Daniel Gern and first question for the clue train, I should have sent this email to Chris to ask him as a proxy, do you feel that the clue train, rather than informing the we, we're giving dangerous ammunition to the they so that they could do it to us and by extension or as a second question, you can pick and choose to read the book. That's like my policy, you can't be trusted Well, and the other question is given in the 2.0 or 3.0 or wherever we are world today with Twitter and social networks are we hitting the point a similar point either of co-option or I'm not sure exactly the phrase that are we, is there an upper limit for every company that wants to be my buddy my friend, my information source just comes back to using that paradox I have a limited amount of seconds per day and I have to decide whether to allocate them and every time I want to listen to you it means I can't do something else there in which case you still want Dan Rather to tell you what car to buy or somebody who takes this place sadly at this point I would rather have John Stewart tell me what to not believe so I'll take part two to take part one okay I'll take part one part one is do we give ammunition to the enemy as over the enemy is there are a couple of vexatious opponents of clue training we might say that insist that what we actually wrote was a marketing book and that we are part of the marketing sphere and it didn't matter if we were marketers we decided for marketing we in fact gave more ammunition to the enemy as it were I don't think that's true I think that the BS detection that we have is better than ever and if marketers want to continue to send messages at us and they want to say clue training messages that doesn't mean clue training is a blame for that it means we didn't understand it so I'm not too concerned about that and one of the ways of reading to your second point of reading the history of the internet especially of the web is as a series of continuous invention innovation in how we're going to sort and filter what we want because it keeps scaling up for hundreds of billions and more and more coming in and we still keep managing because we have to keep managing to invent new ways to help us try to find what it is that we need and what we want to see and so we have too many blogs so Dave Weiner comes up with RSS and that gets refined and there are too many tweets and so well there's a natural mechanism of following people you can control your list so for every base of the pyramid there's some form of filter that all comes out in the wash and one of the most interesting ways that we've been doing it is in fact I think quite a clue training way a lot of these innovations use social filtering use our friends and their conversations and their software but for every dig is there a subvert and profit dot com I think it's still up and running Becca where subvert and profit this is the weirdest shout out to give it's like sell it out I guess talk about you know solid to the enemy subvert and profit dot com which allows you to tap into the black market of votes on social media sites and it's one social media participant at a time who's willing to take a buck to dig something random in addition to all the regular stuff that she digs and subvert and profit takes another buck so it's two bucks to dig does that worry you or you think that'll be outed or are we going to be going to the rotten hell zone again yes that is the rotten hell zone we need a special circle I think that it will always be the case that we are going to have bad actors who are using the openness of the net in order to their line needed because the alternative we shut it down we have strict authentication schemes you do have to take a test before you get on it you turn off the generativity devices I now owe you a nickel because this is clearly your term so I hope that we actually are in a position where people can always gain this stuff because the alternative is a lockdown I don't want to add that I think it's to me there's something wonderful that there are so many ways to not have a life that's sort of what goes on with that I mean you can sell out that cheap that's I'm amused by that but systemically speaking systemically speaking it's like so we had television before and we were all somatized staring at a rectangle I think many where people are being productive than ever before and there are a lot of people who have found more active ways to be unproductive so what got it because I've been watching Shava over here type questions up here on a phone in a Hutton Tech way and she said long questions I wanted to address her at some point I want to have a birthday and I just want to say if you both had any sense of humor the number one question here would be about legalizing marijuana that's so last week so did you want to give the answer to the question or did you want to have Shava ask the question there we go what was the question it was a phrase you used and during the dean campaign where I was a key volunteer in Oregon at the time and working with them getting them online tools like training videos and things like that my arch nemesis in terms of participation was oddly enough move on because move on was circulating all of these things that were web petitions which basically sat there and said come to this website and they signed this web petition which we won't really send anywhere and by the way give us money and people went they signed the petition they gave a donation to move on they got a sticker and they never got off their butts and out on the street so in terms of sensing participation is that like the shadow of they always wanted it to be a faux leather and mouse pad campaign with the aim of using the online to stir up enthusiasm but in order to get you offline doing the work that has to be done door to door and if they feel that they were not successful at that I think this is absolutely one of the lessons that the Obama campaign learned and they did that very as you say they did that very very well and in fact the Oregon campaign had the best shoe leather in the entire country because we decided that we were going to pretend we were a non-profit instead of a political party but we were very advanced that's your limitation yes say no more is what I am trying to say it was not in violation oh okay good there is this broader question of whether forgetting the politics of the moment whether online interactions are worse than real world so by spending time online we are depriving or some other actual face to face and I would be interested in seeing data about that my sense is my own personal You know, one data point which is worth nothing is that I have no friends, never did, in the real world. I have a richly satisfying social life. And then in the online world. So you're saying the clue-paying manifesto is a cry for help. How pathetic is that? The online sex is awesome. Fascinating. I think there's a difference between politics and governance, between a campaign and a government. And we've seen that in Massachusetts with Deval Patrick running a very, very good campaign for governor, using net roots and grass roots in a way that wasn't really seen before on a state level. And then Obama doing the same thing. But both of them are not governing the same way. They're not governing. Deval Patrick has become irrelevant in this state by and large. And Obama is not mobilizing the 13 million people that he had on his mail-in which he still had, in order to push through his programs in any kind of way that I can see. And I think you get locked into that particular bubble. And it becomes very difficult. And there may be something else there in terms of open source and what's happening with hardware and software in relationship to corporations. I mean, I think the next stage will be to govern the way that Dean Patrick Obama ran, which becomes an entirely different exercise. And I think manufacturing in terms of open source. And craft-based, all of the old kinds of things that you're talking about, which are now digitized and ephemeralized and dematerialized around the world. I agree with everything you just said with a single exception of the answer to Jay-Z's question of why, which is power. I think that it's easy for a campaign to work out the problems that the Obama campaign worked out, especially since they were tractionally in the snow from the Dean campaign four years before. I think solving governance is a much, much harder thing. It's a really, really big challenge. The entrance bureaucracies are enormous. The opposition in the form of the entire Beltway business system and the way it works, just the way goods are procured by government, for example, is very, very complex, is regularly beyond complex in many ways. I think it's much bigger problems to solve. That's not about Massachusetts, that's actually at the federal level, but I imagine the same thing applies here, even if Deval Patrick is being weighed in some ways as a governor. I think solving the governance problem the same way is difficult. I would say it may also raise the question, just innately, whether the toolkit you'd want as a challenger, as an insurgent, as somebody that doesn't have easy access to the broader media may be a different one than once you happen to have been given the ticker tape parade and you've got other mechanisms or other responsibilities to what you're doing. I don't know if that translates into the business space, too. Still? Yes. In fact, Doc and Joyce were at our home six years ago last month when we suddenly agreed, wow, the president needs the internet to get reelected. It's got to be our guy. So I embedded myself in the Howard Dean campaign for a week a month, last half of 2003, and learned a lot. The answer to your question is that these campaigns are run, remember the first video transmission things with the guys on the roller skates they go, they get a deck, they put a tape on the deck and they run over and do this. You remember that? That's how it was actually done in the first days. Back in Belle South was doing that. That's how the campaigns are run. They don't have a platform. They don't have a web services platform. They have 45 really smart young people working literally around the clock. And if you were paying those people, it would be a budget that no organization would do. Hallie Suit and I had dinner just two days before Christmas in 2003. It was a Saturday night. And Hallie said, you know, well, I guess all the kids had gone home. She said, let's stop by. There were 45 people working at 11 o'clock on Saturday before Christmas. They had to be there because they had 17 disparate databases. Everything was done manually. You had to have five people there all the time. Now is this a loving story of passionate kids fighting for what they like? Or is it a modern day sweatshop in which they're being given literally peanuts for their work? Both. But the reason is that there's a lot of money. There's a lot of romance around a presidential campaign. Notice that only a presidential campaign has so far been able to arrange this kind of thing. You don't think the open source movement or the pre-shopper movement would claim that that's the kind of passion that they get when somebody stays up all night trying to solve that last obscure and irrelevant puzzle? Right. But until we give them a platform, that is a web services platform that's soup to nuts, it's not going to happen because the government can't build it. I would submit the government shouldn't even own it because the next administration is going to shut it down. I believe it's actually an easy problem that looks hard. I think it's a GRM, which is a sort of shadow project I've been pushing on with Doc. Government relationship management. Where you put out a bid for the government you want. Bid. And it's like, woohoo. Well, not at all. Government looks hard to people because detailed organization is always hard. Running government is probably easier than running GE. But GE, we think we know how it works. We don't. The fact is that government has a proxy battle in every department of the operation every two, four, six years. And when somebody leaves, the whole staff leaves. The whole, you know, government is a very easy problem, but we have to have a platform that is campaign oriented because everything happens in government as a result of a campaign. We can use these same things. The other thing to remember in a presidential campaign is you choose your web services platform real early before you have money. And you can't change it then. You're stuck. All right. Same thing happened with the Obama campaign. We know the pedigree of the Obama campaign of that platform that came from Blue State. Now, they spent millions running around on the roller skates, you know, plugging things in to keep it running. But they couldn't really rebuild the platform in the middle of the campaign. All right. So until we actually build that platform, build a web services platform, purpose build, which is actually quite straightforward. Not technically, it's not cheap. But that's part of the problem. Got it. So I want to put in just one brief marker. I will not bore you or the crowd. I think there's actually a really interesting and encouraging set of initiatives by the Obama administration that should make people who love the web happy. And I would be hopeful. So I would not put him exactly in the same category. But I actually fortuitously ran across the yesterday's copy of The Financial Times on my way home yesterday on the tee. And inside there was a section entitled The Business of Luxury. And inside that, there was a wonderful thing, which I will just read from very briefly. And there was an interview with the chairman of Louis Vuitton. He says, the internet is more and more important for both communication and how we manage our company internally. I have instant access to real time to my stores around the world. Young people seem to like the internet. I feel it as a customer service to sell products online. And it is the greatest risk to this industry moving forward. Talks about fake products being a problem for them. And then he says, we have to find some way to put morality online. After all, this is one of the fastest growing areas of tomorrow's economy. So this is 15 or so odd years after the web has been around. Ten that man of books. Ten years after the clue train has left the station. And this guy seems like the internet. Yeah, so what he's realized is the internet seems to be a big thing. Young people seem to like it. We should really sell online. And the reporter failed to pick up that in fact they're shutting down their online store on the 26th of this month. And they didn't mention that. That's how clued in they are. So my question is this, what on earth is it going to take? Well, failure, no. Failure is very good remedy for this. Actually, no, they talked about failure in here. I mean, this guy has successfully stirred the company through 9-11. Thanks, then 9-11 stars. And I mean, this company's been around for a long time. They have probably capital reserve to fail a lot of times. What can you say? I mean, there's a complete lack of vision and understanding. Undoubtedly, there are hundreds of people in his own organization who are reading that and going, stop it, stop saying that, stop saying that. And there's, you know, this guy just has to basically probably go away one way or another. I'm something magical. Yeah, I mean, you know, then that's a habitat. You know, some are going to survive, some aren't. You know, you're doing very well, but that's awesome. You know, so to me, what you're doing and what others, you know, smart people who actually get the net are doing is more important than what, you know, failures like that are doing. So to follow up on that question, could you give examples of companies that you think get it that in the intervening 10 years have figured out and gotten on the clue train? And if you could make them stockpicks, that would be particularly a problem. A part of the problem is I think with that company now is a laughable exception. And so all companies to one degree or not, almost all companies have some censors. The fact that on retail sites, you now routinely find product reviews uncensored from customers is completely counter to the previous 100 years of business thinking. And now, yeah, of course you're going to, because if you don't, it'll go somewhere else and it's good for people to be happy with what they buy. And that single thing to me is an indicator of just how far businesses have come, haven't come far enough. The fact that IBM, so here's an iconic example. You know, IBM is the company that for a generation, actually a couple generations, defines the conservative business approach. The top-down control, command control system, everybody dread a life. That's how controlling it was. It was the icon of that era. And now it's doing the dams, IBM's dams. In fact, they're franchising dams to other companies where everybody in the company, 400,000 people get to talk to three days over the web. Everybody's equal, your position doesn't matter, and you get to all have values jammed. Wait, and this is good. It sounds like you think these jams are goofy. I think it's good. The fact that a company like that has, they stopped developing their own web server in order because they took up Apache instead. You know, they went open source and they contribute to open sources. IBM, this is a change in their business model, as well as their culture, is astounding and unpredictable and a sign of how deep the change is. Is IBM the perfect example? No, but it's pretty good stuff. I think that the book in fact did change the way we thought about business. Many people thought about business and gave us a lot of energy to create some new businesses and try new things in 1999. Is that right? Is that one? And I think here we are in 2009, and I'd love to hear what you guys think, or even better, here you're going to do a book to help us all start more businesses and get this absolutely deadbeat economy going and kind of kick us all in the entrepreneurial pants, so to speak. And are you thinking about that? We're all going to buy the book today, of course. But what's your next book to get us going? We need some help. More immediately, your shorter term is a shorter efficiency book on the nature of expertise and expertise taking on the properties of network manifesto. So, I mean this also leads to a Barbara Walters style question, which is clearly part of your ethos is how to enter into a conversation. And the reason why it's so hard often for the standard canonical business you're talking about is because they hear things they don't want to hear. They work so long on this product and people might not like it. And that could be true, certainly, of a book produced by people. How do you handle the negative stuff? Is there a way that you would actually want to foreground that on the website and actually have the most negative or juxtaposed with the best ones in the interest of truth and authenticity? I like to engage them. I mean, when I see a critic who's actually got something substantive to say, I like to, you know, call him out and talk to him about it. Rather than say, you're already wrong about that. And do you have comments on your site? I mean, does your site have a blog with comments? The food trade itself is not. We just kind of declared it. Well, actually we had a part of it where people could just sort of post on it. Food trade. Food trade. Yeah. Well, most of it did. We don't have active blogs with active comments. Got it. And do you want to write those comments? No. Yes. There are a lot of, you know, I mean, if it's a spammer or something, you know, I mean, if some spammers get through the filter, you know, they're not saying anything. They're trying to gain Google Adsense or something like that. Those I get rid of. If it's something negative or critical, I always write it through. It's not an issue. And so, yeah. Yeah. The book I wrote after this, one of the reviewers said that it was as if written by a room full of monkeys but not as good. But the right answer is just wait. I was going to ask either or both of you, as people who are almost constantly thinking about this stuff and immersed in it, what do you see as the questions on your mind right now along these lines that remain unanswered? It's a really kind of interesting pressing question. And see if there are thoughts among the people here about the questions before we start. I don't know if either of you want to put a question out there. Well, here's one. It's a structural one. And it actually addresses the digital divide to some degree because there are many, many, many more mobile phones in the world. And there are internet connections, something I learned from Dr. Zofferman over here. And the question is when does the phone system become a data system and not just the phone system? I think it has to do that. I think that's where we're going to head with it. I think when the cable systems become a data system. Infrastructure, I think, is a really big open question. How do we get as close to everybody network as possible? And I don't know what answers to that. Are you confident that when that happens, the result of the convergence of the peanut butter and the chocolate will actually be a delicious treat, will be that essence of internet that you think the manifesto represents, rather than at some point the ethos of cable television or standard mobile phones will actually take over? I'm a utopian on that one. And it's not because I think the net is a panacea, though I think it has wonderful qualities to it. It's because I think human beings are terribly resourceful. I think people are extraordinarily resourceful. And if they have the tools to be more resourceful with, they're going to do creative things with it. And I think that the ability of anybody to connect with anybody and do anything undermines hyperlink subvert hierarchy. I think resourcefulness by anybody subverts hierarchy and actually allows us to create better ones. We're better off than we were a few years, just a few months ago, but I do worry a great deal about the attractiveness in many ways of locked down, non-generative devices like the iPhone. And the next generation of Apple stuff up from the iPhone where they decide the App Store is actually a pretty good model. And so because customers, consumers are really happy because the stuff is safe. So we go to an App Store model and we get locked down for a year. It's not at all a lot of movement at the international level as well as it is exactly, from my point of view, in the wrong direction. So I believe basically a utopian who's still scared shitless. Could you speak about China? That was one thing that scared me shitless. It was the anniversary of Tiananmen Square where the whole collective memory of what had happened was almost erased, depending on whose account you believe. Despite all this technology that's supposed to be able to link people together, but they were able to find technological ways to subvert people from connecting in the way that you guys seem to think is inevitable. So one of the things that I believe ten years ago I was more of a John Perry Barlow internet routes around obstacles sort of in person. And over the past, I'll say at least five years, I'm much less convinced of that. China is one very good proof point. And so maybe if you're enough of a hacker in China you can manage to do the uplink and get your part as a cultural thing. No, you can lock down the internet. There's been a lot of research done, really wonderful research done at the Berkman Center on exactly this question. And it's hard to remain, it's hard for me to maintain my belief that the internet will always route around, but we have so many instances in which for most people, no, it can be locked down. So I think China is scary in itself and a proof point and shouldn't get us working even harder to make sure that our internet stays free. Where our, by the way, doesn't mean American versus Chinese, I mean the internet is ours. From a consumer perspective, and I know there are a lot of people who do digital native studies in here, I'm curious if there'll be a little bit of a convergence between clueful companies and an upcoming generation that maybe won't tolerate the kind of lockdown technology that we seem to fall into so easily but maybe there'll be a different notion about what needs to be unlocked in the future with the upcoming generation. I'm just wondering if maybe there's some hope for Utopia in the kids behind us. Yes, I think there's plenty of hope for Utopia. Absolutely, I remain Utopian and more hopeful than ever in part because of much of what I see happening in the new administration in the US. And I think you're absolutely right, I think it's a generational change that's going on and it will take a full generation for that to happen. Doc and I have to die. No, you can stick around and be the senior and elder statespeople of the movement that has a certain voice to it, whether or not the kids today have that voice. I don't know, we have experts on digital natives here. I'd like to answer the finish in a question because I'm actually very optimistic about that. I think that they're in the long run locking down is not a great strategy and I think it's going to fail in too many cases. I think right now we're still at a time when it still pays off enough but that's going to change and I think it's going to change as individuals get more power. I think as individuals have the power to say, you know what, these are my terms of engagement. I don't want to sign your lousy one-sided privacy agreement. That's one of the things we're working on. What are the terms of engagement that we bring to the table? They're going to be better than the course of ones that you're hitting us with because you don't trust us and that distrust is counterproductive. I mean I think that the Apple App Store is slick and the rest of it but it can't scale. We're seeing these all the time whether they're rejecting one program or another over some specious grounds and why sphincter everything? That's kind of the way they do it. It's interesting to me that companies will talk it open game and play a closed one. It's annoying to me and discouraging that instant messaging, for example, that the Java protocol XMPP has not been widely enough adopted when that's the answer to everybody having a different IM. Microsoft and Yahoo and Apple all have different IM systems even today. Why should Yahoo have a proprietary IM system? It makes no sense. But that's self-defeating on their part and it's going to be proven wrong. I just think that it's going to fail in the long run. So we end with predictions having to with open and closed and top down and bottom up and whether or not we can trust the kids and inform ourselves. As we did ten years ago... Gotta have to. It'll be fascinating to check in ten years from now and see what it would even mean to check in ten years from now. Does that mean we'd all show up in an amphitheater-like room with a screen behind us or we'd finally have those minority reports weird holodeck things? I think not. That's my prediction. And you can take that to the offshore Icelandic bank. With that, I think we owe our guests a huge round of applause.