 I'd like to ask our other three panelists to please come up and join us up here. That was a wonderful introduction to the nature of identity and character out there in this strange space. For the rest of this panel, I'd like us to suspend some of our assumptions. Let me give you an example. I have an aunt who lives in Aurora. She's a retired nun, which I think is an oxymoron. I call her every so often. I call her up and I say, Hi, Aunt Jen. How are you? She says, I'm fine. Your grandmother's fine. Bye. Somewhere buried back in her limbic system, she thinks that long-distance calling is really, really expensive. She doesn't know that the last time I picked up a pen and hand-wrote a letter to somebody was a very, very long time ago, and that I don't mind spending two hours on the phone with friends in California. Part of what we're going to talk about is online presence and so forth. I ask you not to limit your ideas to the current state of the art of online services or even Muds and Moos or even the cable TV system or whatever else. Imagine a world where there's a lot more communications bandwidth, but the problems that exist in this space still need to be worked out and they're problems of identity and they're problems of space. What do spaces look like when you can play with the space and the dimensions of it? What is that like? What happens in these spaces and why are they popular? And can they affect things like loyalty? Can they create affiliations between people or between people and companies and how are they useful in that way? So I'd like to open by asking Carol Peters, who's the co-founder of Da Vinci Time and Space, a company that is presently developing interesting ways of creating new times and spaces for kids between 3 and 12 to talk a little bit about the line between reality and virtuality and the idea of presence and identity. How do you see that evolving? Well, it's such an enormous question and I'm still really quite affected by Sherry's talk, which I think was wonderful in the context of this. The way that we think about this, the way that I and the people in my company think about this is that we're building this thing which we've chosen to call a time and a space. It's very definitely a virtual world. It could be called a follow-on to the idea of a textual mud or a move but the difference is that we've come at it entirely from the television metaphor and I think the fundamental point here about the television metaphor versus the computer metaphor is that the television metaphor is a metaphor populated almost entirely by personalities or celebrities who are experiencing or presenting both to themselves to their compatriots on screen and to the audience out there. They're presenting a semblance of life and life is the fundamental difference. The computer for all the wonderfulness of its environment is it's a dead space. It's a space where there's a lot of tools and you can do things with those tools, part of which happens to be thanks to the internet, the ability to talk to people but the actual metaphor that a computer uses is kind of a dead space and the difference between what we're doing and what a lot of other people are doing and what moves and muds are like is that these are virtual spaces in which personalities both large and small exist and in which time passes and so that's to me this very fundamental thing that makes it entirely different from computers and in fact makes it a semblance of another life or I call it another reality. I mean I often say to people in my company what we're in the business of is reality creation and that the reality we create is as valid as the reality that you experience as RL. Now that's a huge leap of faith because in fact building a space like this, a mud or a moo in text or on television, the phenomenon of it is that you can't understand as the creator of it what it is until the participants arrive and particularly in the construction of a television-based virtual time and space, you have to spend two to three years creating it because of the production issues and the design issues and the story issues and the new personality celebrity issues, the ones that you create but you can't understand anything of its behavior until the audience that it reaches becomes large enough so that the emergent behavior between the virtual space and the other participants, the voluntary participants starts to be its own reality and that's the reality that in fact is the most interesting. So the space effectively becomes an ecosystem of sorts and needs to reach some form of critical mass with participants and then takes on a life of its own and some issues, a lot of issues may be out of your control. Stewart Brand, who is with Global Business Network and many other affiliations, was one of the people who started the well, the Whole Earth Electronic Link in Sausalito, California and virtually everywhere and I'm wondering if you've come to any thoughts about what a good starter kit is for these kinds of communities, for these sorts of ecologies or whatever. It's pretty hard to create an ecology yet they tend to regenerate themselves and there's a whole lot of thinking going on in this area and at Santa Fe Institute and many other places. Is there some set of things you could suggest to somebody to put together that helps spark this kind of life form? I think the fundamental realization here actually comes from a MU experience, the Lambda MU at Xerox Park inspired Pavel Curtis to say that the killer application in the 90s is people and what I've heard so far at this conference is hey, the killer application in the 90s is transactions and it'll probably be transactions and people but the people got there first. There's been 25 years of net behavior where the transactions were basically social and money transactions are now going to be mapped on top of that existing very strong reality. So when we started the WELL, which is a little teleconference system based in California, 10 years ago, 11 years ago in 1984, I had been on a system called eyes for a couple of years and seen things that went very well and not so well on eyes and one of the things I wanted to be sure of is kind of the opposite of what Sherry was reporting with MUs I wanted to be sure that people online had a kind of accountability. The accountability was essential because I had seen people behaving anonymously on eyes in very destructive ways and so the ways that we sort of built in, designed in accountability at the WELL was you asked who we started with, we started with hackers and journalists and it turns out giving free accounts to journalists that was our entire marketing strategy actually. It's sort of like giving drugs to a drug addict in a way. That worked fine. We got more ink than anybody for years and years but the way we managed accountability was by stating it was a regional teleconference system. It was based in the San Francisco Bay Area and I was just asking the current owner, Bruce Cates, what the range of the 11,000 people or so now in the WELL is in, half of them are in California, half elsewhere, about 10% overseas. Initially it was primarily Northern California and Bay Area and the reason for that is that bodies were connected unlike on CompuServe or then the source and places like that where people could get pretty irresponsible because there was no body anywhere in imaginary space. You could get back and sock in the nose for being such a dope. There was the face-to-face option built right into the WELL. Another way we managed accountability and liability really from our standpoint was to say at the beginning to everybody who came on and it's still there when you log into the WELL, you own your own words. In other words, we're not responsible for the stuff you say. Nobody's going to sue the WELL for you being libelous online. That then got over translated into, I can get money from my own words, which turned out to be a complete delusion. Then we also, the software called PicoSpan, this kind of half-baked software, which was so half-baked the other people, as I said, brought in were hackers early on that was to help finish the program and help defend it. It gave us the choice of people's login identity, login ID, being either attached to their postings or not. The decision I made was that their login ID would always be attached to their postings no matter what and that then they could throw on fictional or sort of interactional handled type names, but you would always know that JRC is John Carroll who happens to be a columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle or HLR is Howard Reingold, or SBB is Stuart Brand. Again, when someone was behaving really irresponsibly, there was an identifiable accountable person behind that you could go back and nail. To sort of make the point, nailing on anonymity, people said, well, you know, there's some stuff that people want to talk about in kind of whistle-blowing mode or they want to talk about really private stuff they'd rather not be identified with. Can't we have a place on the well where people can be anonymous and make anonymous postings? And indeed it was written up in release 1.0. We tried that because the software allowed it and it was a hideous failure. It was a very educational failure and I'm glad we tried it and it would be probably worth trying again in various forms. But it was a failure because people, because it was a community now, because of these other things, they started impersonating each other and it is astonishing how rapidly destructive it is when people, you know, if Dr. Sherry on your mud had been believed by everybody to be you, that could mess up your life in interesting ways. And since the mud and moves are accepted as fictional domains, that's one thing. The well is not a fictional domain and when people started fictionally impersonating each other, it was dreadful and that was just shut down. Adam Curry was a VJ with MTV for, I guess, seven years and then decided that he understood what was going on in the technological realm pretty well and that he could probably have more of an effect helping move that forward in interesting ways than sort of being a celebrity on TV. So he's started a company called OnRamp and several other entities and it's doing some really fascinating work pushing the infrastructure in interesting new directions. So OnRamp is in the business of creating commercial spaces for various companies including Reebok and others. But part of what Adam is doing is helping build communities, not TV, broadcast, advertising channels, but places. And I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit on that. Yeah, first of all, I'd like to say that I was, I kind of bummed that Sherry did not turn out to be Dr. Sherry because I was really excited about finally being the person I had great sex with on Lambda Moo. Can't win them all. If you really want to know, first of all, if you want to know what the internet could be, there's a great book, it was on the bestseller list so I know that a lot of you have read it by Neil Stevenson called Snow Crash. And the technology that we have today is not quite up to par so that we can live that way where you put on a headset, there's an infrared transmitter to your computer, you're jacked into the net, you have what's called an avatar, which is a rendering of what you look like, you conduct business, you have relationships over what is known as the metaverse there, what is Neil Stevenson's version of the internet, and the only people on the street in RL are federal express couriers and Domino's Pizza who won the franchise wars. So that is truly the bible, I think, of what we're talking about if you have a chance to go out and read that book. What we're trying to do is, as you say, create virtual communities. How do you do that? I truly believe it's tools. You give people the tools, you maybe give them a little spark of, let's talk about this. For instance, we built Planet Reebok.com. Now, the interesting thing is you cannot buy a shoe off of Reebok's domain. That was not the point. It was not the point to be another retail outlet, but to create a community. Reebok really has a lot of interesting things. They've got sports celebrities, they've got coaches, they're involved in human rights now. They've changed their logo and said, build me a community. And we did that. And now there's people online chatting back and forth talking about lo and behold, sneakers. And they really get into it. My sneakers have feelings and people go back and forth. I'm not kidding you. It's really happening. Now, where we are today is that text is a very, very powerful tool. When you read a book, you get a visualization of your own view of that. That's the same with a mud. It's a text version. When a snowball rolls into the room, the top pops open and a voice says, all aboard who are going to the snowball room, I have my own vision. Everybody here will have their own separate vision of what that snowball looks like outside on the inside. People like Knowledge Adventures, who I think are doing some interesting things, are not there yet for a visualization of that. They technically are not there yet, where it goes fast enough, where there's enough imagination that you can really visualize what is happening. And therefore, Sherry really summed it up beautifully, that the muds, or we have the multi-user dimensions, the moves, my favorite is the multi-user shared hallucination. I'd like to take it just a little bit further. That truly is where communities are being built. Most muds have a theme or have a strong presence of people who create a theme. Give them that, and the rest builds itself automatically. I really like the statement that the killer app of the 90s is people. That's definitely it. How involved have Reebok people been in Planet Reebok? They really took a lot of our recommendations and have created their own presence on the back end. There are so many companies now that are like a checklist. Let's throw up a shingle in cyberspace. Gee, we're Zima, we got to be there. Okay, great. But you go there once and like, okay, I've seen this thing that I probably never drink anyway, or maybe I will, but what's behind it? Well, answer is nothing, because there's just some CEO or someone who's unfortunately usually an information services person. It's like, well, we set up the LAN, we actually talked to Lou Holtz. You can talk to people in marketing. There were great postings on the bulletin board. You guys are involved in human rights, so how much do you pay your workers in the Far East? They responded within two hours, and that's what it's about. They're online, I mean, they're not a fictional character, but they are a real presence. I think a shiver just went through the spine of every PR person in this room. And that's good, that's good. Exactly. I'd like to circle back to some of the stuff we started with, both about celebrities and personalities and character and identity. Bob, are the people that you're speaking with as sort of tuned into these kinds of dynamics, as it seems like this panelist, and are they eager and anxious to participate, or does this sort of scare the hell out of them, and they think they see their revenue streams going away and the rest of their business? First I found Sherry's comments very provocative and surprising to the extent that there is real work going on to build business plans, and actually launch business plans in 95 where shows would be on the services. I used the word shows on purpose so that you know at 7 o'clock a particular show comes on and you could do one of two things. You could sit and observe the show in the dialogue on the show or you can participate in the show. Now, I'm not a social scientist, but the difference between what Sherry was talking about and what I'm seeing in terms of business plans is that there are boundary conditions. It is clearly fiction. There is no crossover on the line. It's clearly fantasy, but it gives people permission to create character and move into their transitional period and yet it has to stay in some boundary so it doesn't undermine the show. Some of the most creative people that I have met in the last year are working in this very area and looking to make their careers and hosting and creating personality around that show and characters around the show that we could then interact with or observe. What happens when, for example when I started getting hot, there was a fellow named Scott Yanoff who put together an interesting places list that originally was just tech stuff and it became known as Yanoff's list and you would go there to check for new things and I had never heard of Scott Yanoff in my life but he became a character in my life and then at some point I started getting Adam Curry's Cyber Sleeves report and I'm sorry, I didn't know who Adam Curry was but I started getting this really amusing thing and after a while if Adam had pointed to something I would have probably followed that link and put things out. If you have a stable of talent under contract and yet somebody who's outside becomes an attention getter and becomes a magnet for activity that affects you and involves you what kind of role do you play? How do you deal with that? I'll probably put them under contract and take 10% Come on in. It will happen. I just wanted to point out that I like to say that people often ask me am I talking about mudding or using virtual reality as a kind of psychotherapy and in a way I am and in a way I'm not I like to say that mudding is most psychotherapeutic for people who are also in psychotherapy and by that I mean that people create characters they have experiences they get involved with situations for some people it's just what a therapist would call acting out it's just doing actions but not being able to metabolize them in a way that really is kind of gross building for the person for other people it's more what therapists call the working through that is they really work through some set of issues that are very helpful to them in their RL the reason I bring this up is that central to do that is the creation of one's own character and some degree of control so that the introvert can play the extrovert if that's what he or she needs to do and so forth so I just want to say that I'm a little bit concerned that some of these phenomena that I'm seeing are very dependent on the person themselves being able to create some significant dimension of that character as opposed to there being some set of characters in the show that you can play I'm sure that the market is going to force the situation to have just the right amount there'll be a variety of things but the right amount of the person doing what they need to do versus the professionals creating a sort of seamless production Stuart sorry the question is stars online which clearly will be happening increasingly when it's truly interactive some sometimes uncomfortable things happen when if you have a famous person online like yourself if they are online a lot like Howard Reingold is on three hours a day seven days a week it's completely comfortable that a famous person happens to be talking to a lot of people who aren't famous yet and that's fine when you have a famous visitor to a domain where people have been online a lot as for example in the well in the Generation X conference they were talking a lot about this book called Generations and someone invited one of the authors of Generations on and he came on and was a really bright, active, interesting person who had all kinds of I thought fascinating information but he was flamed right to death and after about a week of putting up with it disappeared and was never seen again this is another reason by the way I'm in favor of accountability in these kinds of forums because the more you have accountability the likelier that flaming will not occur but it will I don't know exactly the solution to that problem yet various people have tried putting a remove so that the question the famous person only hears polite questions approach but that's a little limited Lori Anderson I saw it was backstage at her show a couple of nights ago somebody put her online because they were filming her in relation to cyberspace for discovery channel program and she was on with five or six other people one of whom had already said that they were Lori and so the entire discussion was not interesting interaction with Lori Anderson who is astoundingly interesting woman in intelligence it was you know who's the real Lori Anderson what a bore a touring test for Lori Anderson how would you like to prove your really yourself this also points out another aspect you talked about working through this also acting out that happens online and things go out of control really quickly Adam I don't know if you're going to talk about well I was just going to say being you know you say famous person I'll tell you in the show this latter VJs are really down at that bottom rung but when I first really went online and it's very difficult when you walk down the street and all or you know you're eating and people come up to you it's uncomfortable I'm with my family I just don't want to be bothered and that's where you get that star aura when you're online that is gone it's not there that invisible force field you see Eddie Murphy walk down Eddie you can't touch it that is completely removed what I did see in the beginning certainly was people thinking that was a dumb blonde you can be male or female obviously and that went away once you you talk to people and they'll really open up to you but your point is well made about the impersonation of people on the other hand you can really show your true colors Billy Idol said hey I'm a cyberpunk called this album cyberpunk did a cyberpunk video and did he ever really read his mail I think he had a well account but no he didn't people saw through that and said forget about it man you're not for real but going back to Scott Yanoff sure the stars of the net are on the net I don't think it's a question of coming from outside we don't need to take existing content existing celebrities and put them in cyberspace they have to come from the roots up and they participate over time Carol I want to touch on another thing Sherry alluded to which has to do with whether there is a virtual space in which reality some kind of something highly resembling reality occurs which is what you're talking about Billy Idol is a real person and the other possibility which I think Bob was a little closer to which is the idea that you would create some kind of a virtual place that's fundamentally a fictional place but it's a fictional place that's authored I might say at least perhaps in a dominating sense but at least in a string sense by a set of people for whom that is their specialty in other words if you have an entirely creative writer artist, author, actor and the virtual place carries the thread of a story that has been created by that artist or that team of artists and then within that space the participation of the viewers is in fact highly with relation to the story that's ongoing but also secondarily entirely in relation to the viewers as they interact with each other sometimes commenting on the story and sometimes not at all that's actually a very different kind of virtual reality or virtual place than the well is and I think that well that's certainly the sort of corner of it that we're aiming at and I think that's where a lot of the real talent community is going to contribute to primarily creative intelligent people with story creation capability or character creation capability or both and that as a dominant theme changes the nature of the place that you're creating I'd be interested in any of your review on this but we've been studying talk radio and we really bumped into it because it seems that that has many of the attributes that we're talking about where there is personality and yet people have a permission maybe to say things on talk radio that they wouldn't say face to face is that is that a precursor to what we're talking about? I once did a study and let me show you how what you associate to I did a study of the home shopping networks and the religious calling programs on both of these television situations are ones where people call up and give testimonials about the products that are actually being sold and they have permission in those settings to talk about their families and their diamond eek and how changing wearing their diamond eek for those of you who don't watch home shopping is a diamond like substance called glass but not diamond, don't laugh they make a lot of money it's a big thing and people call in and talk about it and through talking about the products actually do adopt different kinds of personas in relation to them similarly on things like ptl and 700 club when people call in there's a similar sort of I think of them as spaces that are kind of on the margins as being both in the real and outside of the real and I actually think that it's the tension between that are just enough in the real with just enough permeability to the real that the real action and the real compelling holding power of this medium takes place I think there's going to be a lot of exciting things and kind of I'm waiting to play you know Scarlett O'Hara and Gone with the Wind my whole life I'm ready but it's a casting call in the morning but I think that the most provocative from my point of view where people are trying to work through these things are going to come in places where there's that kind of creative tension between what's real and what's not please come up to the microphone with your questions Jerry I want to add one more thing to another factor here that really changes the dynamic of what's going on the difference between what you can do in a virtual space where it's networked and therefore there's a large number of people and by the way every single individual person has their own experience which is by some percentage factor different from everyone else's experience at that exact moment in time says that you're creating an environment in which there is no central conversation there may be a central theme or story but it's controlled by a vast number of people or kids in our case it's not like a talk radio show or PTL where there really is one person to whom things flow in and then the sort of pattern is evoked a virtual space is one in which many patterns occur and happen simultaneously and that's a different form so it's not the Rush Limbaugh virtual space Adam I hope everybody heard what Sherry just said about Home Shopping Club very important point Jim Clark to pay attention as well the reason why that is so successful, QVC is because it's usually everybody sitting at home nothing to do, they're a member of a club they're hanging out, they love to talk to Jim hey I picked up on that item that you had on last night, too bad it was sold out that's the success it's not just a matter of oh I can transmit my credit card information securely, very good point it's both the 15 minutes of fame aspect and also that this is the safest call you will ever make to have that opportunity to be on the air this host wants you to shine they absolutely want you to be the best person the universe and the best spokesperson for their thing I saw I think two marks show up at the microphone early, Mark Pesci please yes hi, I have a question communities they're not ephemeral they have a history, they're persistent what do we need to put into our communities when we're bringing them into the virtual realm to provide mythology and memories so that they have a continuity associated with them and what have you learned about that and finally, we have to keep in mind that all of the pathology that's present in real space is present in cyberspace and what do we need to do and I think Carol you're probably most concerned about this to prevent that from happening well, I'll give two quick answers but I'm sure many people have things to say persistence and two items one is well three, one is persistence one is acquisition and one is creativity those are three dominant themes in the development of our programming we build a time in space and time is real time passes it starts the first time a kid ever shows up and it proceeds forward and it is consistent so within that, the kid is able to in fact develop their own you called it mythology we have huge arguments about cosmology versus mythology etc but the point is that a kid within the space discovers a persistent and enduring quality and passage of time they are able to acquire collect things or looks or aspects that remain unless they actively change them and then thirdly they are able to be creative, they not only can be in the space and see what happens and communicate with a community of other kids, they also can create things and then do the things with their creations that people normally do like sharing them or hiding them or you know etc so incredibly important I think the other thing about us since we do kids only safety is a dominant and important factor and so anonymity is not allowed and we use our software architecture that of course underlies on all of this, not only to monitor and implement the persistence and acquisition and creativity things but we know always what a kid is and we know how kids relate and we have a whole structure I don't really want to talk about having to do with how the kids are living, so to speak within a safe space because that is in fact the enabling factor that allows them to discover and grow within that environment Stuart, I think it's a great question that communities really require some memory of their own activities in the past and one that we've seen in the well is people, there are some people who become pillars of the community I mentioned Howard Reingold and John Carroll and they are such on the well and their persistence there that they're on a lot that people respect their views on things they can break up stupid fights they can do a lot of things they can say some issues that's an old argument and it's not very interesting and that actually is active another way you can deal with that there's a archive conference where topics that became sort of defining for the community basic horrendous issues that got just hassled out like if you own your own words do you have copyright on them and if anybody else quotes them somewhere else they pay you, issues like this would get endlessly argued and to some extent not necessarily resolved but the argument is there so on a newcomer raises the issue and everyone else is starting to yawn in their face they can say actually you want to see the debate on this go to the archive conference topic and it's there I will say that I joined the well one of the first incidents I saw was a suicide by a member Blair Newman who sort of did a mass scribble which means he erased all of his postings on the well the day before he took his life and I saw eulogies I saw all kinds of activity it was unbelievable and that happened shortly after I got on the well and that was a defining moment for the well and that's part of why it was preserved so much and that also by the way the issue of mass scribble, mass scribble was one of our users they often do cobbled up a tool and the tool allowed you to go to identify all of your previous postings and disappear them with a press of the button a really destructive tool but it's interesting because experience of that kind of power added a whole level of responsibility to the people in the community in a sense any one of them could nuke major conversations just by eliminating their own past in that conversation and so the discussion of that not only the death of that guy and how everybody felt about him and about his death but also that issue was argued out and it's there and it's part of the community memory Mark Stalman please to start from the front I wanted to draw our attention to the subject of morality briefly here very interesting book published last year the science of coercion assembled the data to demonstrate that in 1950 90-95% of all social science in the United States was paid for by the CIA the research that is done on many of these environments that are terribly coercive and to my mind quite immoral when Norbert Wiener was asked by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead to turn cybernetics into a mechanism of social control he refused in fact it was so important to him that he wrote this in the introduction to the book and then went on to write a second book the human use of human beings he was one of the two most famous mathematicians that had radar and anti-aircraft so he got away with this but MIT in particular and Stanford are filled with people who didn't refuse and who in fact have been using these technologies or trying to use these technologies for social control and brainwashing purposes over the course of the last 30 years when Jane Jacobs revolutionized city planning with her series of books about neighborhoods she was put to task about the morality of the neighborhoods that she was creating and spent 10 years without publishing anything and just last year published a book called strategies for survival where she addressed these questions of morality I was first going to ask Bob the question when I walked in the room he was completing the sentence Hollywood has two sides there's the creative side and then and the second path of that course is and then there's the mafia the Hollywood production companies and the creation of culture is a very dirty business in this world in which we live and I'm wondering if we can somehow jump over that 10 year period if the fellow whose name I can ever pronounce who wrote the book flow Jacinta Mahaly was taken to task that the experience flow is the same whether you are writing a symphony or engaged in mass murder and he then had to write the follow on book the evolving self and had to try to address the question of morality I'm wondering if we can leap over of all of this playing around with postmodern immorality and actually address some of the basic moral questions up front before we build these worlds we were wondering where you were Mark Sherry I have a way of I don't know an easy way to leapfrog things but I just recently did a small study of 25 over 21 25 people who are over 21 who consider themselves political activists in cyberspace and who didn't vote in the last election now when I say they consider themselves political activists in cyberspace they're creating democracy on land to move they're very involved in the petition system I'm using the term somewhat loosely now this is my interpretation of your question as it impinges on my work and I think that when I studied I think some of you in this room actually were people who I interviewed nearly 20 years ago I studied the early hobbyist movement which had there was a real link between the way they saw the computer and the kind of political impulse to make the world a place for more transparent understanding for more direct politics an exciting link that they saw and at the time I worried that this energy, this political energy this morality, this focus was being turned into the world of personal computers you know to get to the outside and now I feel that there is some kind of similar issue for me of a moral nature that I think I try to address in my writing and in my speaking about this energy, this desire to create new utopian communities and new more democratic forms of address and organization we need it in the RL and how to make sure that we create I'm very big on this notion of permeable spaces how to create spaces that both impact on the virtual world and also on the world outside so that's my perspective on the issue that you're raising Thanks, Bob did you want to comment on the question at all? I have an answer Mark on that a lot of what I see in terms of today's world in movies scripts coming forward and the average price of producing one of these things is now about 40 million dollars and so that the those who control the productive resources and have the access to capital to not do one movie for 40 million because you can, you have to do 20, 40 movies because you know you're going to have duds so we land up in our society today having a high concentration of power around the productive assets because you need large institutions to create the product today one hope is that as we more and more move into the digital environment and the cost of producing an equivalent product can be driven down and so there's a greater distribution of productive assets and therefore we can have up on what we call servers today the kind of product that Carol is going to be making and others and much more choice for the individual and some moving a democratizing what is available and leaving it up to the individual to choose as opposed to what we have right now is I think about 2400 movie screens in this country and about 150 movies those numbers could change dramatically and therefore open up the door so I have some optimism, thanks. Can I say something just really quick? I mean this is just such a key issue for me I almost hesitate to speak but the sort of movement I've made in my own career from building computers that turned out to enable a larger population of creators and producer who can create under their own control and produce under their own control so that more voices can be heard led me in fact to the surprising decision to actually become one of those creators or at least to create a company in which many of those creators could find their voice and would also find their distribution and I think you know what we are doing is a very focused effort to create a particular product for us and our goals around that are probably much more lofty in the morality sense than I would say in public or would believe we can achieve but on the other hand the technology really is a massive enabler here and one of the enablers is the hardware, the second enabler is the set of tools that people will create we are not creating in any way a general set of software tools, we are creating precisely those software tools that allow us to express our vision but once we do that they may turn out to be able to express many other people's visions because there is nothing about the concept of a time and space that means that it is only for kids and the technology that enables its construction is kid independent and I think the third thing is the net itself I mean many people here think of the net as something that runs at 14.2 or maybe 56kb that is entirely transitory very soon the net is going to be ubiquitous enough and the pipes will be fat enough so that not only a small number of perhaps people in the vanguard like ourselves will believe that it's worth building video to send over the net because that's what the net is able to carry and having that visual and stereo audio capability being able to be delivered into anyone's house and for that to actually be the website is the power that's ahead of us all and that will enable mass expression not just mass reception at the first mic please give hox you at the pacific group two really quick questions principally for sherry I think could you share with us a bit about the real people who are behind the virtual characters planning about not having enough time for family and personal pursuits in their lives who has the time for mudding what are they what is their partnership or marital status what's their professional profile then a second question if you could follow up on that one what's the forecast for their marital status too what pursuits are people giving up to pursue mudding well the first that's just such an excellent question the first question it's changing very rapidly I mean I don't want to pretend that when I began a couple of years ago I didn't feel myself almost exclusively in the company of 18-19 year olds I mean it just felt like that it no longer does I mean there really is a very significant change as more and more people are discovering this so many are married older it's changing this is an exciting I mean I haven't seen Carol's product do you have it is it done can I play I mean I haven't seen that but mud is pretty interesting and the variety of kinds of muds of relationships people can have on them and people are drawn to it the reason I began with the notion of windows is there's a big misperception of how busy people use muds they use muds by having them on all the time creating maybe I went a little quickly over that part creating a character and writing a small program that's a little agent program which beeps you let's say when one of your friends comes on the mud your character is present it's sleeping if you see somebody this agent might beep you when a sort of list of people who you're interested in you know one of a list comes on you wake that character up you put aside your one two three or you know whatever you're working on or your simulation of bacterial genetics or you put aside what you're working on or your manuscript and you interact for five ten fifteen minutes on your kind of mud coffee break you leave again you go to another mud you go back to your work the reason this is I think of this and I'm the chapter of my new book that's on mudding is called Parallel Lives the reason I think of it that way is that it really is not an alternate life as much as it is a parallel life that facilitates that's why I'm so interested in the membrane between the real and the virtual that facilitates integrating it in some way with your real life so as more and more people discover that psychological use of muds the the sort of demography changes to people who I sit at computer screens for a lot of my day and I don't have time on my hands but the notion of cycling through these different places where you live is part of people I think people's new experience I would also offer as an example that you could by putting yourself in a particular place offer information to people outside your office or outside of your your local environment so if I put my character in the study hall that might wind up being some kind of affordance that tells people hey don't call don't send don't interrupt me right now if my character is in the cafe drinking a cappuccino that means I'm hanging or in my laboratory with the door open that may be a very nice way of indicating to others that I'm interruptible and I would enjoy somebody who wants to interact about my work or something of that nature Manny from Microsoft I'm also a Manfredo on Lambda Moon I wanted to tell Adam that it was good for me too baby seriously though I wanted to ask both Adam and Carol something which is I honestly believe that creating these virtual environments especially the moon like constructivist ones is a new medium and I've been going around talking to book authors or movie people or animators and I often find that the people who I think are going to be good at doing this are not that they're too much tight into plotline or they want to create something which is really impenetrable that people can't change it and I'm wondering what your opinions are on and who you think are going to create these successful virtual places Carol I don't think I can answer because it's a company secret no not to be totally joking about it but that's really the hardest question because you need to find people who are in fact very talented writers you then need to take their head apart and put it back together again and part of taking it apart is we have in our company two things one is we have an interactive design team which is an extraordinary group of people who are principle in taking the writer's heads apart the second is that we have an engineering team that's built continues to be in the process of building and will be building for some years now something that we internally call the narrative engine and the narrative engine is a new piece of software technology that in fact is able to execute the deconstructed new writings of these writers or I should say the new writings of these deconstructed writers I mean it's very hard well first of all anybody can create a mud there are many different programs just compile it on a shell account and it's up and running as long as you can get away with a bandwidth considerations at your college I don't think that you can commission someone to write a great mud it's an organism that starts it happens they bring their buddies in or people come in and become their buddies and it just kind of evolves you know the trick is I guess is to go out and find someone who's done a great mud and say hey I want to put you under contract but it is I truly believe it's impossible to commission someone to say go write me a great mud just like the one you did over there I don't think that's possible and I would second that by saying we're not just building a graphical mud it's not a mud at all it's an entirely new medium and it's really important to note that by the way let's get away from the word new medium and call it new movement it's really a big difference maybe Sherry can back me up every 30 years people get into a whole new vibe 65, 68, I'm a little bit too young to really witness it but was it okay? it was great there was a lot going on that's where my parents were hanging out and doing really funky stuff and so now I'm the product of that and so now 30 years later we're into a whole new movement people are doing completely new things now the press is starting to come up saying hey this is the revenge of the nerds yeah damn straight Bob did you want to comment on that well just to the question in terms of the people you've been talking to the large percentage of people who make product in a linear world will not make the transition for a variety of reasons one of them are making enough money now and they know they can make it to retirement without worrying about this issue but there's a class of a novelist screenwriter, actor, director who recognizes and very deeply that this world is going to be their life and they don't have a choice they don't want a choice they like it and so these are not the big name people today other than with a few exceptions this is the new class and what you're looking for is the new talent it's like the people that made it from radio to movies and then from movies to talkies and so on and so forth sound pictures Rich Miller if you ask a quick question quickly you will have the last question I apologize to the rest of you with the mic the quick question is to Stuart and then to Bob it seems to me that the whole notion of intelligent agents as it relates to navigation of information is really something that you Stuart have been involved with for as long as I've been in the Bay Area which is a long enough time and that is navigating information for other people at a certain point what we really want to do is imbue your taste in information into an intelligent agent and then allow Bob Cavner's CAA to act as your agent to provide your taste to a variety of different people doesn't this challenge the whole notion that you can replicate a star and replicate a star's vision or ability to navigate through all of this this ocean I suspect this is more a question for Sherry because we're really talking about a good bot a good AI that has learned either by being told or by watching I guess what the election principles of somebody that other people seem to enjoy what they get led to by that person there are you can do this hmm remember this is such a bottom-up domain that a lot of the leadership comes not from leaders but from conversation amongst a whole lot of people and so there again on the well there's a topic conference that everybody goes through of what's happening on the well and everybody will be passing on tips of cool things that are suddenly turning up in this X conference or wherever and that's a lot of the guidance you actually get not through personalities that way now it might be interesting to train a bot to pick up the taste of whole conferences like that but Sherry should speak to the likelihood of this happening well there are bots that are being developed that are trainable in that way that in a sense look over the shoulder of people and do and do perform that kind of that kind of function I have mixed feelings about their about whether this issue of kind of the I mean you're really talking about sort of a taste and personality and I have mixed feelings as to whether or not you're going to get that or whether I really like Pavel's the Pavel quote about the killer application as people and I see the transactions really as being an extension of that and that somehow this medium is still going to this movement is going to allow people to have access to other people's knowledge more directly before we move directly to bots I think that this notion of a conference that people have together will still feel more appealing I have no doubt that that will be more appealing and that's the short term but having spent a greater part of the last 10 years thinking about intelligent agents one of the issues is is it saleable and I believe it probably is the idea of being able to ask a bot with Stuart's approach to things to navigate a particular topic on art because I just read his his book on architecture I mean that's something I'd pay for and if it's paying for George Will to navigate through baseball maybe I'd pay for that but not as much I'm afraid we have to wrap up the panel I wish we could speak all afternoon I want to thank our panelists for a fascinating time and now to Esther and Bob Frankenberg actually Terry we can speak all afternoon just one on one that was a great panel thanks a lot it was phenomenal it's kind of hard to follow though going from that level to plumbing