 I'm Jonathan Citrin with the Berkman Center and the law school and CS departments here, and I met Virginia when I was a law student here, and I don't remember exactly how we got first introduced. I just figured this all out, and I'm going to save it so you can be able to – I think I know. Okay. Yeah. All will be revealed shortly. And Virginia was a grad student in comparative literature, is that right? English. English. I don't know the difference between English and comparative literature, because as far as I can tell in English, you also compare literature. But even then, despite my cluelessness in almost everything, especially English, Virginia was somebody who was tolerant, had this constant twinkle in her eye, was always finding the most interesting and playful nuggets within works that might be very old or very new. And so it seemed so entirely fitting that she should end up as a career journalist after doing the obligatory tour as a fact checker at the New Yorker. She got to generate her own facts in the most postmodern of ways and examines the camera and output of our popular culture, both through television and, of course, more recently through the Internet. And some of the adventures which Virginia may share that we've been on in excavating what's going on with the Internet and the culture built around it, it's just hard to think of anybody better than Virginia at confronting it and confronting it in such a spirit of joy and twinkle and what there is to discover. Never has somebody so smart been so unpretentious. That sounded very pretentious, didn't it? So I certainly can't claim the title myself. I should instead just turn it over to Virginia Heffernan. Welcome. Thank you, Jonathan. So every time, as people who go to Harvard probably experience, and some of you who are here as students now may experience, when you think you've got it all together as long as you're outside of Cambridge, but the second I set foot back on the campus, I regress and barely think that I should have a place at this center table, much less this place with this microphone. So I'm a little nervous, but I'm also reminded when I come back to Harvard that unlike in New York writing for the Times or Yahoo, where it seems clear to me that the internet should be approached in a spirit of a kind of literary play, instantly at the law school, I start to think that I need more rational analysis, more reference to governance. And it's hard to argue with anyone who says that what the digital revolution or digital culture needs is more rational analysis and rational governance, but it still seems plain that the internet is not a governable place, not an analyzable place and not a rational place to me. It's always been, since Jonathan and I first connected to the early days of the World Wide Web in the early 90s, a set of speakeasies and twisted clubs and back alleys and kind of lower east side tenements. I think of the internet as a Jane Jacobs message board world and not a Robert Moses Facebook world, although that may be changing. The spaces of the internet that first captivated me are illicit, they're polyglot, there's lots of masquerade there, there's a certain level of prowess required and secrecy because the straight offline world should probably not quite know how intense and hallucinatory and profoundly pleasurable this internet thing is. Some 15 years ago the internet seemed so clearly a set of pleasure arcades and demi-monde cabarets that I was sure at the English department it would be seized by post-structuralist literary critics and anthropologists who would claim it for themselves, for ourselves. Granted it was the 1990s and deconstruction was smarting from the charge that it was relativist and amoral and French and creepy and at the time I agree that maybe physics or ethics or the law were rational and shouldn't be exempt from deconstruction but the shadowy contradictory densely metaphorical world of the internet, surely I thought that would fall to diridians and I considered myself an un-reconstructed, undeconstructed, aspiring deconstructionist myself so I wanted to be there for the spoils. I didn't expect that Mark Zuckerberg would steamroll over those aboriginal villages and heterogeneous cultures and produce his own kind of Stalingrad and I didn't expect that Steve Jobs would attenuate the relationship between individuals and the open topsy-turvy web creating what I think of as the web suburbs, better known as apps. I didn't expect mechanisms of the market like Zuckerberg's and Jobs's and others to subdue or at least pave over the kind of dionization chaos that to me defined the web but let me back up a little bit. By the internet, by that phrase, write this very second on March 27th, I mean to designate very arbitrarily Spotify and Pinterest. I think of, when I'm trying to decide what to hold in my head as the image of the internet for a given hour, an hour at a time, I think of a review Anthony Lane wrote of one of the, I think that's like one of the end of the world movies, maybe Independence Day where he said that in an inspired piece of casting, the whole wide world was played by the United States of America. Sometimes I think when we talk about the internet, the whole wide world, the whole wide internet is played by social networking. When it's sort of common conversation about what's going on in the web, the subject falls to Facebook and Twitter, it doesn't fall to ways the GPS technology plays out in mobile or the intricacies of search. So at any given time, I know I mean something different and you all maybe mean something different when we're referred to the internet or digital culture. But right now, just because I've been playing around with them so much, Spotify and Pinterest are what I'm thinking about when I refer to the internet. So let's take a look at those two then. When I look at them, I see the same things I saw when I first signed on with my CompuServe account as a portal to the web, how much poetry there is on the web, how much longing these services kindle in users, how many odd people you encounter, and how many strange ideas you're allowed to entertain with those services. So 18 years ago when I met Jonathan, I was a third year graduate student at this university in another yellow, haunted yellow Cambridge house, Warren house that used to house the English department. I was a TA in a class on Thomas Hardy and another one on Henry James. I was 24 and I was settling in to become a G19, so with spooky eyes and a perpetually undone dissertation that was like my local heroes. And I thought I would just walk around here without writing a dissertation but talking about it for as long as they'd let me. A friend of mine in New York thought I should meet her friend, a 3L named Jonathan Zittrain because the whole reason she thought we should meet, we had a common love of computers. She knew that I was 73773.143 at CompuServe.com. She knew that Jonathan was, okay, I don't remember. 73703.3022, that's right, the number is octal. With the cop, wow. And it's weird that I don't remember because they're so memorable. I mean they're like just little perfect gems of catchiness. So when I met, exactly, when I met Jay-Z in 1995, he was, I think, or 1994 maybe, he was literally short selling AOL. He'd gone to short sell AOL because CompuServe was so ascendant and he was also a sys-off at CompuServe. I was studying Thomas Hardy and also committed to CompuServe. So we were both solidly on the right side of history, that's something we had in common. We had bet against AOL. We were ready to go with CompuServe. I lost a bunch of money shorting AOL because I was right too far ahead of time. Oh, right. Always a danger. All right. Jonathan invited me to audit a seminar he called the Cyber Law Seminar right here at the Law School and super-intended by one, Charlie Nesson. Looking back, I realized, I just realized I don't know how that introducing friend knew I loved computers. I had taken great, great pains to keep that secret and I don't know how she found out. Why secret? Because the truth is, like Othello with Desdemona, I did love computers not wisely but too well. Your addiction almost lead me to waste at a tender age. I had fallen for network computing in the 1970s. Dartmouth, the college in my hometown, had set up a mainframe computer and given townies like me who were in grade school the chance to learn Dartmouth basic, one of the first interactive computer languages. Basic was developed by the then president of Dartmouth, the great John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. All I knew when the college hosted this demo of basic for grade school students was that those of us eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds, ten-year-olds who sat for the lecture had a chance of fulfilling that highest calling of all school children who, like me, were born around the year of the moon landing, we might one day work at NASA. Girls could do anything, uppity astronaut girls unite, off I went. Like most lectures, this one didn't captivate everyone, but a small group of kids were hooked. I learned that you could make a program that would say, like, you're stupid at the end. And I was one of those kids. I just wanted more of it. So I asked my dad for a Xenoth Z19 dumb terminal so I could practice basic and a rubbery coupler so I could dial in to the mainframe computer on our sole family line, tying up the phone for hours and sometimes it seemed days at a time. And from there I heard the first squeal and crash of information transmission, that mysterious complex sound that quickly became Pavlovian to me. When it hit, it meant I was in. In where? Well, into the Internet. It was 1979 after all. CISPROGs, who oversaw Dartmouth's heaving rhino of a mainframe, already had network computing underway. They'd established something called Conference XYZ, something between an adventure game and a chat room. It gave up learning basic. I signed on as Athena because when you're 10 and you get to choose your own name, you're a Greek goddess. And actually when you're older too, it seemed like other users, Dartmouth students and others went by names like Apollo and Zeus and liberally referred to damsels and steeds and Stonehenge. I don't know why. All this adventure game ambience. I'm going into all this not just for the pleasure of reminiscence, but because 1979 and 1980 were a time when the culture that most excited me and the people around me in my college town, which were books till then, books like Tolkien's novels, television like the Love Boat, electronic games like Merlin, slipped and to me became digital. The world I entered there with Stonehenge and damsels and steeds and Athena was never a rational one. It was about magic and runes and it was hard for me to see the internet. It's always been hard for me to see the internet as anything else. Very quickly into the use of kids at Dartmouth and also Dartmouth students who were using the computer, they almost always described themselves as playing the computer. So when my mother wanted me to get off the computer and stop tying up the phone line, she'd say like, you've been playing the computer for hours. I wasn't using it. I wasn't working on it like we pretend we're all doing now. I wasn't reading it. I was playing it. And somehow the idea that this is a game really got in my head. Something about the creation of and also close to the adventure games like Dungeons and Dragons that it had drawn all this energy from and vocabulary from. Conference XYZ had masters and slaves and it had, there was references to chain mail and that got a little bit lost in the chat. But somehow I still believed and it still seems roughly true that if you look at Facebook as a massive multiplayer online fantasy adventure game, you do alright. If you think of it as other things, you start to go wrong, I think. But if you imagine that you're in a fantasy game with avatar creation and curation and that you're interacting with other players in persona, the way that you'd play an adventure game or even the way you might play soccer, you start to imagine what the rules could look like a little better. It's also not a bad parenting rule of thumb for parents who are anxious about social networking. So like many of us over the past few decades, right then I began to attach my emotional life and fantasy life. The life that I might have entrusted to music or novels, I attach those to this new symbolic order. Defined by fast distribution and display, by collectivization, by atomization and loneliness, by an oscillation between connection and isolation, frustration at computers that fail and then new frustrations with humanness, which fell so far short of the virtues of accuracy and velocity that were suddenly possible online. There was something else online too, an almost deranged sense of longing and superstition that only the deep and weird populist black of cyberspace can conjure. I sometimes wonder if those of us who started computing before these beautiful backlit screens and before mobile, who remember when you were like looking into deep space in your, you know, like the green letters, if it's only us who think of cyberspace as like fundamentally dark, because maybe you all see like beautiful, or those younger people who started later, see like beautiful apps all lined up and don't think of it as like kind of haunted, but maybe someone can tell me afterward. I also, it seems to me like a religious space. So I know this is, we're in like kind of freaky territory here, but it's my experience that people who talk about science are kind of drawn to, seem to be to be drawn to atheism where people drawn to technology are more likely drawn to romance and superstition and sci-fi. So every time I risk talking about religion and cyberspace or religion on the internet, I'm pleasantly surprised that it's not at least completely pushed away the way it might be when you're in a room of scientists. It's been sort of part of my, part of the project of this book, Magic and Lost, to claim the internet for people in the humanities, for literary critics, and sort of rest it away, or shake it off as a subject just for science and business writers. It seems almost amazing to me sometimes that science and technology share space in newspapers. Technology, every year I become more convinced that technology is actually the masculine form of the word culture. That if you want to talk to men about culture, you tell them you're talking about technology and they're suddenly calm. So, yeah, right, exactly. So, and then as time, as time we're on, on the internet, I had to realize that the internet was not just a twinkly, magic place of happy elves and people with chainmail armor, but also was defined by this persistent aura of grief. I should say that I've had real periods in my writing life where I felt like a Bolshevik or like a, in 1917 or like a wild proponent of rock and roll or like John Perry Barlow or something where I thought like the resistance to digitization was, it was just this like passing thing that would have to be like, we'd have to like push through everyone's leftover, like small minded sense of grief about what they were losing. And I used to hate more than anything when someone would put the breaks on a conversation about digitization to rhapsodize about like the smell of books at Widener Library or how sad they were to, that we didn't write longhand letters anymore. I was just like, oh, you got to be kidding. And like the Bolsheviks maybe, like listening to people talk about Baroque music or, you know, I was just like, come on, this is the, this is progress. But that talk never really stopped and I think I've had to realize that that sense of, persistent sense of grief and loss is kind of intrinsic to the way the internet functions. And in a way, part of the beauty and part of the problem of the internet and it also has now had a profound influence on culture, especially anti-digital culture, undigitizable culture that we see around us a lot right now in the form of the comeback of live music. The amazing to me fact that day after day, year after year, all people seem to want to do in this world is go to panel discussions and sit next to each other in small rooms like this. I mean, this is webcast. You guys could easily have stayed at your desk in, you know, Missoula, Montana and seen this, but for some reason, we want to be in a room together. And other kinds of analog technologies that have made comebacks, including like super traditional ways of living that show up in the steampunk culture and maker culture and here and in San Francisco and Williamsburg. I don't think we would have predicted even five years ago that the future would really have all this rough edges to it and all these undigitizable 3D kind of fetishism. I am reminded of something else from the period where I met Jonathan. I was a teaching assistant in a course taught by Philip Fisher on the 20th century novel, which is worth auditing by anyone who's here. And he was describing the influence of new technologies on prose style, like at the level of how sentences are formed, what a new technology might do. And the example he gave was, at the beginning of the movies, two important 20th century American writers, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, both were enthralled to the movies in different ways. They both wanted to write for the movies because there was more money in it than novels. But they also felt very threatened by it because storytelling in movies is different and very visual. And they had two really different reactions to it. The Fitzgerald reaction, probably the one that I would have had, was an effort to win Hollywood over, sort of write really filmable sentences. So I think the description, I should find the passage he cited, but it was in Tender is the Night. It's a description, literally, of a movie star. And you might as well be seeing a curtain go up on her. There's a description of her emerald dress and her bright eyes. And it could be in technicolor. He wouldn't have to do much to change it into stage directions for a screenplay. Faulkner, while he also wanted to write for the movies, had a more perverse, twisted side to him. And he wanted to write unfilmable sentences. And so the sentences in late in August that Fisher cited included ones really in the conditional or subjunctive. So if he had looked back, he might have been aware that she'd been thinking unfilmable sentences. Sentences that can't be rendered in the movies. And so I think not to spoil the surprise, but I think the part of the dialectic we're in right now, as analog culture was sort of super-ceded by digital culture, is some of us are kind of trying to create artifacts deliberately with an idea of them being digitized. And others of us, others of you, are trying to elude digital culture. So I don't think it's an accident that foodieism is a reaction, I think, to digital culture. I always think food is frustratingly can't be digitized. I'm a person that prefers astronaut food. I can't tell the taste of one thing for the next. But I understand a lot of you think a lot about ingredients or whatever. And probably part of the pleasure in it is that it takes all that work and fire and things that don't exist on the internet. So I bring up why I came to the internet through this in the spirit of play and adventure game. Because I do understand that people come to the internet for different, you know, for other reasons than I did, not just for social life or for experimentation. So if you came to wage war or put men on Mars or communicate at DuPont or to promote your lighting installation company, I just sat next to someone on Amtrak who was working on his lighting installation company, Twitter feed, or to exchange snapshots of crime scenes. You probably see technology differently than the girls like me who came onto it for social life at the dawn of the 1980s. But I'm not sure that it's just the people that came onto it to communicate to DuPont who should be responsible for kind of theorizing it. I think increasingly there are people whose first encounter with digital technology is maybe closer to mind than it is to the architects of ARPANET. So to be candid, I should say that at this very moment I can't believe I've even said the words conference XYZ in public at the Berkman Center because I can still so clearly remember pre-fight club when the first rule of fight club, the first rule of conference XYZ was there was no conference XYZ. And it's an amazing fact that the world has changed enough that I can bring up this thing that was like this kind of shameful strange place in the process of putting together like contributing a little bit to an official history of the internet. So conference XYZ almost laid me to waste. I met people who let me drone on about Reaganomics and Dartmouth football and they never asked my age. In turn I got to hear their ideas about etymology and the Aerosmith and nuclear winter and no one told me to butt out. So it was paradise for a kid looking to grow up. I should also say that very recently I learned it was like a gay cruising scene. So I had no, but no one, there was no predator or anything. I mean it was mostly, everyone was very polite with mixed cases. It was a really very good scene. To my parents though it looked like addiction. And then at 14 my friends started calling me Desperado and singing Desperado when I came around because they believed I was into computer data and it couldn't be cool in the real world. So at 14 I swore off my conference XYZ habit. I think there are a lot of us like this. In English literature seems like the kind of thing a girl should study not computers. So I went to college and I never visited the computer lab once. But the repressed returns. And in 1992 or three when I first heard of email I couldn't say no and I signed up like Jonathan did and that's how I found myself working on an English PhD enchanted with post-structuralism which coincidentally offered a huge set of critical tools for understanding decentralized symbolic orders and yet hoping that I could rejoin the march of digitization. To my delight the internet was still new enough that everyone who talked about it. Even Jonathan brilliant Jonathan 3L and Professor Nessen and John Perry Barlow who spoke during that first cyber law seminar seemed to be bluffing. I am Athena. I am a 10 year old pundit of conference XYZ. So anywhere that bluffing is allowed speculative and unfinished speech about speculative and unfinished civilizations like the internet is that's where I want to be. I do think the internet may be the great masterpiece of human civilization. As an artifact it puts to shame the pyramid, the aqueduct, the highway, the novel, the newspaper, the nation state, the Magna Carta, Easter Island, Stonehenge, Stonehenge even. The Chanel suit, the airplane, the pencil, the book, the printing press, the radio, the realist painting, the abstract painting, the birth control pill, the washing machine, the elevator and cooked meat. As an idea it rivals monotheism. Just as in Nietzsche's scheme man created science which in turn killed God, analog culture, books, clocks, film, industrial machines, the compasses and timers of scientific method, created digital culture and now digital culture has superseded it. This is all extremely exciting. Of course the digital world also brings dysphoria, this low level but constant heartbreak that's one of its most controversial side effects. As I said, I used to try to ignore the blue mood that haunts most of the cultural writing about the web. I considered myself a sort of dialectical immaterialist. I hoped that we were moving away from stuff heaps of the past that I envisioned and sometimes still envision as those houses on hoarders that are just filled with three dimensional things toward lives of near total abstraction. I really believed we'd be over our nostalgic fixation on analog culture in its totems very quickly. I thought even the manual typists and vinyl collectors would find the iPad soon or fantasy football and they'd be up and running. But it's still here, the persistent sense of loss. The magic of the internet is not working for everyone and in essence we're missing something very worthwhile in identity forming from our pre-digital lives. Is it a handwritten letter? Is it an analog phone call? A quality of celluloid film? A multi-volume encyclopedia? A leather-bound date book? Is it a way of thinking or being or falling in love? During the process as some of you may know of converting analog audio to digital, something is lost. MP3 compression in particular squeezes out certain sounds believed to be superfluous to the ear. That transformation is known as lossy compression in a beautiful phrase. Something we can't quite put our finger on is lost. Comparable lossiness informs digital film, digital images and digital social life. That profound conviction that the web has taken something from us is an idea as old as the web itself. You can find plenty of this sentiment in alarmist bestsellers and articles and reports about attention spans as well as the superiority of vinyl to MP3s and paper books to e-books. I, having read the research now, as I'm sure many of you have about attention spans or brand damage caused by the internet, I feel very confident that this is like a protracted case of hysteria about a cultural object. It really sounds close to how people used to write about, think about novels and how they morally corrupted us. And it is pretty amazing that this is put in the vocabulary of cognitive science. I mark my words, cognitive science one day will be like bodily humors. It just, there's no, it's impossible to get to the bottom of it and somehow people can learn it and do it without an undergraduate degree in it. There's no labs, there's no MRIs. If I'm sounding defensive, it's partly because when I went to sell this book, Magic and Lost, I wanted to refer a lot to culture and aesthetics. And I was told that you could never, I could never use the word culture and certainly not aesthetics. I mean, I thought if it was an academic book, it would be like towards an aesthetics of the internet would be the title. But I really wanted the towards also, but they talked me out of all of it. And it really asked me, almost strong armed me, is there any way you could say that's a cognitive science of the internet? I mean, I know nothing of cognitive science and I've talked to other writers who've been asked to put cognitive or science in their titles. It's just, I don't know, it's just sort of a weird time. Many of, many people who remember life before the web try to placate the more anxious among us by arguing that the internet is old hat. A translation or a retread of other existing institutions and nothing more. I thought the social network, the movie did this by arguing that Facebook is just a blown up version of the social clubs at Harvard. eBay obviously has been called a bigger, more eclectic Sotheby's, Amazon is a virtual Barnes and Noble, Craigslist is just like the classifieds in The Village Voice. And lately, I think that that effort has even gone more strenuous and there's more sophistry to show that the internet is just outside re-workings of old institutions. I think that the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation or a strong misreading any more of those precedents. The internet by now has a logic, a tempo, an idiom, a color scheme, a politics and an emotional sensibility all its own. In my work as a columnist and in this book, I try to take individual artifacts and things like the hanging video of Saddam Hussein, the lonely girl videos that Jonathan and I took some interest in years ago, various kind of hoaxes online, bits of music, MP3 music, and use literary critical methodologies to try to understand those things. Tentatively or avidly or kicking and screaming, nearly two billion of us have come to take up residence on the internet and we've actually adjusted to its idiosyncratic ways much faster than sort of theory has kept up with us. So this transformation of everyday life in the central argument of the book includes moments of magic and an unavoidable experience of profound loss. I've come to recognize that as the central aesthetic dynamic of digital culture. Thank you. Questions and how do you, Jonathan, you lead. Well, it's a kaleidoscopic journey, which is a great silence that just followed. It was like a really thoughtful silence. And part of what I heard you asking for was, it should be clear, by the way, Virginia has a new book coming out. I think I neglected that and he had her touch with me called Magic and Lost Towards a Cognitive Science. By scientists who use a lot of scientific methods. Exactly. It's called The Pleasures of the Internet. The Pleasures of the Internet. But I heard you, Virginia, inviting people to compare notes. I mean, a lot of what you had to say was very personal about how you came to it. And I couldn't even tell too. The loss you were talking about was a loss of analog and compared to the losses that was perceived when rock and roll came along and when the novel came along. But I also hear you talking about the loss of the early days of the environment. That that's actually what you miss. That that's what, in such strong terms, you describe Mark Zuckerberg as setting fire to, that that's what you're losing. I love Facebook and I actually, no, I don't feel, I don't really feel that way. I do feel that me, no less than anyone else, comes to the internet. I keep also, the internet keeps existing in different spaces for me. Like I think you say like the internet, it only gets back there to you. But anyway, obviously right now it's at the screen for me. I'm dogged by a persistent sense of loss and sometimes I associate that with the change, especially the move to apps away from what I think of as the open commercial web. But I've been really happy, I use apps a lot and I've been really happy with paywalls and enlightening the advertising burden. So for instance, Smith for me, saying that you see two plus two is five right now, but you don't really believe it. It really is, okay. Well, maybe some, I'm always really interested in how people sort of came to their first encounter with the internet. So maybe you don't see it as play or maybe you don't experience the lost part of the magic part and maybe, if I'm right, that has something to do with how you first came to the internet. If it was like an irritating thing that you had to move or if you did stoner and radar during the war and we're happy to see YouTube like some veterans have said. I don't know, maybe someone can tell us about. One other question on this before we open it up, which is you talk about the experience that people get kind of the first time they immerse in it. Now with its ubiquity, everybody's using it. On the other hand, there are still a lot of people using it for the first time. Kids are getting online, they're getting out of Club Penguin and coming into Facebook or wherever they're going and they have even more time on their hands than the rest of us goofing off at work. So in some sense, if the internet is the social networking space, one of the kind of moves you made, it is worth maybe dwelling on how much of that social space will indefinitely be defined by kids who are just starting to find their voice and be a little reckless and, because 4chan, for example, seems to be both a place for kids and a place of great grief. But I think it's only possible to understand 4chan as a game, not as something real, even though when they dox somebody, when they send out their armies forth, it's affecting real lives. Yeah, I just had my second actually run in with the formidable Paulites, the Ron Paul supporters, and I was trying to figure out, because Ron Paul seems like the, maybe the reigning president of the internet and he's coming up on, I think, eight years and there are no term limits. So Ron Paul may really be the president of the internet in perpetuity. It is incredible the like silencing effect, real-world silencing effect that his followers can have on actual journalists. Tried to write a few critical things about him at the New York Times. We were so inundated with comments that a really sophisticated veteran editor, he didn't just publish a retraction or blog style, write a small correction. He tore it off the site and like buried, I mean it's one of the few times it's like you can't find this thing anywhere except for like some screen grab by Paulites because that looked like a real show of force to him. And you know when Ron Paul didn't do well in that election and when he won't do well in this election, we still will think that there's something going on. So at some point I thought maybe the real world, the real world that sees 4CAM is very threatening will start to see it as sound and fury that happens somewhere else. And the real world and the internet will just grow in these diverging lines. Seems like you and I must really be in different parts of the internet because I could go for weeks without ever encountering anybody who has any affiliation with Ron Paul whatsoever on the internet. Have you ever mentioned the words Ron and Paul in a blog entry or Twitter post? Well, I might have mentioned in a live journal here and there. I can't remember. But it's not a subject of great interest in the places I hang out on the internet. He is this fourth place candidate that he's, you know. Yeah, well, I mean people have said before that part of the way we, you either feel maybe inundated with Ron Paul people and that's a false impression or you don't see them at all and that you're also missing something because it's an interesting libertarian crowd and there's a reason that he dug in so deep on the internet that he's got a natural following there. Anybody else want to tell like an originary story of when I first saw the internet? So, it was high school. My brother was, you know, Gateway, brother. Well, and there was also like, so we used to like fish, you know, that band that he was like sheenful to like. But the rec music fish online was like where you go to get the lure, like where's the good show or where's it playing? And so like, yeah, that's where we used to occupy the phone lines wet, like cruising that area and right, just like spinning up such a big story out of so little information and so much fantasy that, you know, it's like, you know, it's intoxicating, right, like the, it was like teasers. And yeah, so it's right, when it didn't give you everything, I filled it in personally with a lot of stuff that I wish it were doing. Did you contribute or did you? No, I didn't really contribute and I actually don't contribute much to the internet still. Oh yeah. But yeah. That's pretty cool. I'm not, yeah, the shame part is interesting. I mean, when we, one of the jobs in my first conversation at the cyber law seminar, I think was about which amendment might have some jurisdiction over whatever the internet was gonna be. And we were wondering if this speech, I remember our Jonathan said at one point, is this a weapon? Maybe this is a weapon. And, With the Ron Paul people out there, I just want to, I'm a big fan of the second amendment, just. Yeah, exactly, just so that no one shuts us down. But, so, you know, when you sort of, people in law schools were wondering, is this a weapon? And you were at home thinking that this is a way to like tell a partial story of a shameful kind of fandom. You know, we were having, it was being read in very different ways, I think. You know, there was someone, Jamie Gorillik, who was she, we've talked about this before. Jamie Gorillik was, at the time, I think, just coming off of being deputy attorney general under Clinton, and we were arguing about encryption. Yes. And whether or not the ability to encrypt a message between two parties, such that the government, even with a warrant, couldn't successfully intercept it, the Clinton administration had been considering and had implemented export controls upon encryption as if it were a munition. And that's the question of internet as a whole. And she, we went to dinner with her afterward, and she was telling horrible stories of things that had happened in telephony and other communications technologies that had had insufficient government oversight. And the one, the main example she gave that was supposed to strike fear in all of us was that some pranksters had found a way to beat radio call in contests by getting their phone to dial in over and over again and walk away with tickets to fish. Clearly not a state issue. That's a federal issue. Right, exactly. You went treaty perhaps. But I mean, the way she said this so somberly, like what could the internet, because we were trying to think of what horrible things the internet could be used for. And finally, to beat radio call in shows, I just thought like, this is a lot of firepower. I mean, there was Nessa and Arthur Miller, and you and everyone was around the table, and she was a government person. And we were all worrying a lot about the radio call. But that, in some ways, when you think about what's changed since then, one answer is not much. There keep being new things that scare powers that be. Napster was a twinkle in the eye then, but came about and had the same pattern. 3D printing is the next Napster. You have to talk about a simultaneous trademark, copyright, patent infringement, all downloadable. And then you print out a Nike swooshed mousetrap that infringes everything at once and kills mice. A weapon. A weapon, exactly. Well, it's true. You print out a gun, you print out the bullets, and away you go. That's gonna be what Jamie Gorellic's worried about next. And maybe that's a favorite we're finally at some really dangerous territory. But I was thinking the thing that really, maybe has crystallized just recently is, it ties back to the magic part of it too, which I hear in you the magic you discovered. And maybe it's just relating to me the magic I discovered was there were people out there that I could connect with that weren't judging me or asking questions of me in areas that I didn't care to answer. And the first time you got the equivalent of, I didn't since I wasn't on AOL, you've got mail and it's from a stranger, but it's something helpful or kindly, that is a real discovery. That's kind of a sense of magic, the fact that you can be interacting with strangers and yet they're not bad people. That's really powerful. And when I think about what regulators might ultimately worry about getting away from the onesies and the twosies of encryption here and 3D printing there and Napster there, it's the power of the space to allow people who are strangers to connect with one another. But that is both a profound threat to many iterations of the state. And it's also the profound magic that tells people they're not alone and there's stuff out there not mediated through the regular institutions. The other, I remember the other thing that Jamie Garlick and others were worried about and they still are worried about was pornography. And there was a lot of talk about pornography that first year. And when you talk about connecting with strangers that you haven't met yet, suddenly we're in this territory that can intrude a certain way, could sound like pornography. The amazing thing about the internet to me is how the internet is not for porn. Well, it was interesting that your chat room turned out to have an extra layer you had no appreciation of. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Probably no coincidence. Yeah. Well, I think the internet has become very good at doing something that borrows from the energy of pornography without actually being pornographic. So this happened kind of brilliantly at YouTube. When YouTube first appeared and other video sites appeared, it was an article of faith that they were gonna like kudzu. It was gonna be like you'd call up YouTube and it would be overrun with the predator plant that is pornography, it'd be all flesh colored. And it just wasn't. And what happened once that predator plant was cut back is all this other crazy diverse flora and fauna sort of bloomed on the site. And they did a nice job and the Apple does a good job at kind of keeping that at bay so that hopefully other kind of things can develop. But it never loses that kind of illicit sense of like I shouldn't quite be here. This thing is shot weirdly. I have like this particular visceral reaction to these images. A lot of early YouTube images were like showed accidents and danger and things that are meant to make you wince or laugh or have a physical reaction. So it's like kind of like pseudo porn so that parents feel uneasy about it even though there's nothing illegal about it. And that propels the sense of pleasure. Which maybe is a quality rock and roll at the time too. Yeah, but you're like almost right, almost crossing a line, not quite crossing a line. And it's also so elusive from kind of regulation. Well, but it might teach Jonathan's lesson which parents are scared of talking to strangers might not turn out to be bad. Yeah, right. And all kinds of like language mixing and glass mixing. Talk about loose loose. Talking about strangers could be bad, that's bad. Or it could be good, that's bad. Either way, I don't want you talking to strangers. And the internet is for nothing if not for talking to strangers. I kind of, through this, I think the internet was sort of designed as a regulation mechanism that was extensible. So it was designed so you could add lots of additional things to it without the designers of the internet really being able to envision or even trying to envision all the possibilities. You can look at it as a little bit like extensible computer languages or anything else that's extensible. It's opening up worlds without really anticipating or even being able to anticipate the different directions. There are some other trends that I find interesting and maybe a little bit disturbing. One is the dichotomy between the internet as a global village of nice people. The internet was originally designed as a benign community of people, for a benign community of people you can trust. Whereas when that didn't turn out to be true, it's also a trend to have being divided into lots of gated communities. Virtual private networks, various censorship mechanisms that people are trying to superimpose on the internet either to protect themselves or to protect other people with or without their permission. And the third thing that people seem to not distinguish, because there's so much virtual reality on the internet, it's easy for people, especially young people who are first being introduced to it to sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between virtual reality and real reality. I was talking to some friends recently, and I'll relate this story, since you like stories. There were some small kids in Israel who had always been talking to their grandmother in England via Skype. And when she appeared in person for the first time in a while, they thought she had jumped out of the screen and were next expecting the Cookie Monster to come out and join her. I think the way young people these days take the internet and all of the things on top of it for granted is really becoming part of the underlying culture. And with the extensibility of things, it's leading in new directions, many of which we haven't anticipated, but with odd effects that. The right before, I'm glad you brought all that up, right before I got on, or right before I dropped regular Dungeons and Dragons in favor of Conference XYZ, there were a bunch of books and stories about people who had started playing Dungeons and Dragons and then come to believe that they were clerics and were lost forever in this world. I mean, that is all kinds of cultural artifacts are beginning with the novel, the one thing that I maybe know best is great terror that we're gonna not be able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. And I think that 20 years of the web has sort of shown that it maybe doesn't matter that much that we don't know the difference. Or it's a losing battle to try to teach the difference. I don't mean to go to science fiction on you, but I remember when they first introduced the concept of monocle for your mobile device, the idea being, which is I understand it, you can hold your device up and it's telling you something about the world literally in its position in front of you as you hold it as if you were wearing a monocle. So Yelp has a monocle mode where you can just see what restaurants Boca Grande swings around on your iPhone as you try to hone in like a tricorder is a wonderful constellations app that you can hold it to the sky and tells you the constellations. So we're really not, I think, that far from having that in your spectacles, in your glasses at which point when you're plugged in and when you're not, we're already pretty close to it. The number of people walking around head down through Harvard Yard about to hit somebody. But when it is in the glasses, and I don't know, how many of you now in a vaguely unfamiliar neighborhood before you dare to enter a restaurant want to know what Yelp or exactly? So it starts to then be, I don't know, the reality now is more the stuff that's coming from online or as much as it is as what you see directly in front of you. I know that in conversations about commerce and retail, it's always about hybridizing, so you can both be on the J-Crew site and in the J-Crew store. And online sites want to introduce stores like Amazon, Brickson Larder, and do as well as the Apple Store is done. It's like in Amazon, but with bricks. It's with bricks, kids, this is gonna be weird. Yeah, yeah. You know how you log on? You enter a door, is there? Yeah, yeah. And yeah, they a lot of talk about hybridization. And I just went to a recording studio with some friends who were making music and the place looks so different from an 80s studio with like a million, all black and perfect and antiseptic. It's like all these weird old instruments and creakiness and all they want are tubes that you have to blow out because they're dust in them because you won't get good sound. And then there's all these pro tools at the same time around. So it's like this Apple thing and like an old tube all next to each other and then like someone butchering their own meat in the background of everyone has an iPhone. It's like, I don't know if it's true that way in Boston but that seems to be what digital life looks like right now in New York, yeah. Well, I was gonna say that just the augmented, the fact that reality is augmented digitally. I mean, it's augmented kind of in other ways like street signs and store signs are a type of augmentation but there's a symbolic layer on the real world except we just don't see those as augmentation anymore because they're transparent. And therefore there's nothing new here? No, not that there's nothing new. I'm just saying there's, I agree here that there's nothing to worry about is that initially like the novel in the 19th century there was kids were really into like recreating doing home theater type of things and those practices were always seen as somehow escapist and threatening to kind of the, because in a way they fall out of and the regulation. Would it matter to you if, I mean, it's really expensive to maintain? Think how old fashioned it is to like tack a sign every single corner in Cambridge. Somebody has to put a pole in with a sign labeling the streets because people didn't walk around with maps or anything like clearly that's gonna go the way of the dodo at which point what you will see when you look out in a city is entirely unlabeled things not augmented at all because it anticipates that you'll have the device. Does that worry you at all? Clear, clear things up, clear up some of the signs. Yeah, I think everybody's glasses will program what they want to see. You might even not see the buildings the way every, you see, I mean, there's no reason we should see the buildings the same way. I happen to like blue, you like green. But I think we shouldn't underestimate the force of the Faulkners in the world who want to, the troublemakers who wanna create like unassimilable, grisly stuff. I mean, I really, I don't know if anyone is as like impressed by this like kind of back to the landism or whatever that's so alive in New York. There's so many kids in, you know, undergraduates who are really, who love to talk about how they don't use the internet or they're off their phones all the time because they, you know, are too busy making their own clothes or it's so, you know, I just think we couldn't have called it. You mean these people online or you wouldn't be counted on? I mean, you know, undergraduates in colleges and yeah, who are, you know, Etsy culture, you know. Well, what I'm wondering when you describe this kind of thing is, you know, to what extent does the internet actually facilitate that type of activity rather than, you know, being something that the activities are reacting against? I mean, there wouldn't be the 3D printing maker culture without, I don't think that would exist in this form, current form, without the internet enabling a lot of that. I mean, there's some, maybe fish is a good example of us. I think knitting culture has expanded. Absolutely, rabbleweed. Absolutely, rabbleweed. Night without a network. Yeah, right, so. They, yeah, it occurred to me at some point a few years ago that one of the things that message boards I most like to go to were about this, like, incredibly sensory physical experience of perfume. So I loved reading perfume reviews, just like, so far away from the thing, like some, a perfume that I didn't have, talking to people I didn't know about a scent. Which you can't demonstrate online if you could demonstrate a painting story. Right, and all I wanted was to, like, read a proliferation of language about scents that I didn't know and then, like, imagine one day buying them. And I don't know what that experience was about. I mean, fish isn't really, like, you know, it's like really, you think of it as, like, really earthy and human and you all wanted to be together, but you also wanted to have this, like, symbolic experience of it, too. Right, and, you know, you know, and people would talk about drug use and stuff and, like, their drug experiences, too. Yeah. Right, it was like, there was a whole bunch of different discussions that, and there's, I feel like this, the, sort of this, there's this whole thread running through what you're saying, which is exciting, which is sort of, like, it's not like this conversion experience story. Or it seems like it's a provocative question that you could just ask many, many people and they have a uniquely personal answer that's probably mostly just interesting to them, but they're impassioned to tell. Yeah, I spoke at a law firm a few years ago and the questions were, I thought the questions would be about, would be super rational about the internet and this was, it's a, I won't name the firm because I don't want to get them in trouble. They were on their lunch break, sort of like this and it sort of turned into how people use the internet and one of the partners said, I spend a lot of time going to the Wikipedia entry for my great, my ancestor, Calvin Coolidge and just making small adjustments. Anyway, suddenly he was in this world of Wikipedia. No one, and then someone else had gotten interested in photo changing on Flickr at the time because first he'd been looking at crime scenes or something, weather patterns or something for us. And then he just started wanting to upload his own photos as far as I know, billable hours. But, you know, like people were not, I don't know, the thing Jamie Gore like or the thing that lawmakers believe we use the internet for does not seem to be what we're using the internet for. And you can't even get, you know, somewhat like the straightest looking person in the world to say that all he does is like, you know, formal email and checks like, you know, top prices. A huge chunk of time is like fancy football or whatever. Yeah. So the story you tell of the lawyer is a story of a connoisseur going through the stages of connoisseurship, which as I understand it, you start with just an emotional reaction to a work. Then you learn to taxonomize a little bit and you get categories. Then you eventually figure out how to relate the categories that you're creating to the emotions you first experienced. And then the final stages, you create your own work. And I, so that was kind of the path you were talking about with him. Finally, he's uploading his own photos. And your path is one of connoisseurship. You're a connoisseur of this environment. Yeah. In a very wonderfully meta way. So I'm just curious, as far as the stage of creating your own work in it, is it just the day-to-day of interaction that you experience or as a writer, as a Faulkner, how do you see your own contributing in building in this space? Or is it, again, just kind of like breathing? It's a day-to-day thing. I lurked for a long time. And now I just contribute to message boards under a code name that's not Athena. Uh-huh. And then, yeah, and then sometimes, sometimes like an article I write will show up on a message board. And then I just think there's another person with my name who's also in the game somewhere and that is not me. And you comment on your own article? I don't defend my like sock puppetry kind of thing. I don't defend. At least equal age against the machine. But, you know, the promise is important here. I mean, you learn things like, you know, you don't troll and sock puppet, that's like kid stuff. But it takes a while to learn. I mean, I think it's worth like not contributing for a long time until you know the rules. I mean, the old message board thing of like, read the whole thread before you post about Flashlights. We've already talked about that. It seems valid. I want to tell one other thing about anti-digital culture that I just remember because it's a recent thing. A fascinating example of a company kind of embracing the manufacture of undigitizable artifacts. Acuity, the insurance company, last year issued its, I don't know if I told you, but issued its earnings report in the form of a pop-up book. Pop-up books are all made, including the mass produced ones like Path of Bunny are all, it turns out, made in China in this only in one factory by hand. You can't actually like press them through in machine style. So they made this thing and it was like really beautiful and incredible with like all these little, I mean the greatest pop-up book I've ever seen and then made a limited edition of them. And it cannot be distributed online anywhere. It can't be reproduced, it can't. And so the first ever Acuity earnings report that was like a covetable object. And you know, really, I think really smart. I mean, really smart if you care about market capitalism. And along that spectrum, is your book going to have a life digitally online without barriers or will it be somewhere in the middle where there's a Kindle edition or how? I mean, as far as the, it's funny, because like thinking about the future of publishing, it's hard to find people who are willing to pay for 3D books now, except one kind of person that is really willing to pay for 3D books, authors. So the author of the book always wants a ton of 3D, of like real books, but readers don't seem to want them. But it is amazing, the self-publishing, the idea that you'd pay $40,000 to publish your own book and that's not like a shameful vanity enterprise, but like the only way to really get it print. I don't, I really, if the publisher decided to skip the staff of the print thing, I think I'd be okay. But would you be okay with having it freely available online, people can email big chunks of it to one another or comment upon it or is it just? Yeah, yeah, I don't, I try to get people to, same way I try to get people to explain why vinyl sounds better than MP3s, I try to get people to explain why they're like, what's so bothersome about plagiarism or the demise of intellectual property laws and the way that book payments go, you don't expect to see that much on the back end anyway. So I wouldn't, maybe if I were making a ton of money by keeping the value close, I would worry about that, but it's hard for me to feel emotionally attached to, it's just been, you know, we've all been writing online for so long, you're used to people cutting and pasting stuff, but that doesn't stop hearts from being broken. And you've been around it with the New York Times, paywall, no paywall out there, in there, now a complicated system that appears to be working. I like my in there part to be really unreproduced, you know like actual barriers instead of legal barriers to reproducibility. So like, you know, I don't know, I just saw the eight hour gap performance of the Great Gatsby of the public, and it's, there's something wonderful about seeing something that can never be reproduced. And you know, talks like this one will never feel the electricity in this room ever again. And you know, then you don't have to have like an agent and a lawyer enforcing it for you. So you mentioned technology is the male instantiation of culture. Am I right in noting that all questions have come from technologists rather than culturalists in this framework? Anything from the ladies? That's no way of putting it. Does this dive with your experience? Okay, go ahead. This is, I was just wondering if you've read about the New York album, which is being released on iPad and has like interactive capabilities. And I'm sorry, could you speak louder? I was wondering if she's heard about, or if any of you have heard about the New York album, which is being released as an interactive type of app, rather than a CD or MP3, or even online MP3. And I'm just interested in that in the future of the recording industry, because that seems like something also that will be difficult to pirate and also something that people will want to consume. Like all moves toward Apple, I definitely approve of it, but it's one of those things that looks progressive and advanced and it's in fact like incredibly conservative. And it's like what a great idea to freight it all that probably charge $9.99 and fill it with video and make it only playable on iPads. And it's exactly the opposite of the kind of stuff that John Perry Barlow wanted to see in the music world when he spoke here 20 years ago. It's like a turkey testament to the way the culture evolves that you can look really tech savvy and be at this stage especially. I mean, Apple's paved the way for this, be sort of anti-web, anti-glass-nosed, pro-intellectual property law, and yet look like you're doing the most advanced thing. It's a really conservative time, but it's a really interesting time. I mean, I'm not, I like the suburbs as much as the next person, you know. And the web sometimes looks really junky and dangerous to me. I wouldn't, if I were Bjork, I wouldn't put my stuff on MySpace either, you know. She's a savvy move, especially someone associated with that much. I love how MySpace is like this total outlying jungle, run by News Corp. Yeah, right. That's really enticing. Service, man in neighborhood. It's a creative project. I just noted that that would be interesting but it'll be difficult to pirate and it might change the way people release their music. But I think she wants it to be, or at least her record company wants people to think that it's this really interesting creative way to interact with people. And it seems perfect for her because it can have a lot of video and maybe even game stuff. And I mean, it sounds great. Doesn't that end up being just basically a challenge to people to break it, remix it and produce something else from it? So far, the Apple Store, the App Store has done a nice job of making that impossible. But maybe we'll see a big tour in the world pirateable. I don't know. I thought I'd ask, does anyone rip them off? You know, I think the price point is set to make it so the only people who are going to do it are Mako. So, because he does it for the joy of it. But you would establish that you could, but then you wouldn't. You're better than me. Somebody wouldn't do that to save. You can do that? Oh yeah, Mako. You should make it. So the answer is yes. There are versions of, like, there are places where you can get all these apps which are stripped of DRM for the Apple Store and also for Android stuff. Wow. But it's like Chanel bags or something. Like it just, it's disreputable enough that it's... I don't know. So I mean, it's all right. I don't have an iPhone. So I mean, like, to enter that or an iPad in part because I mean, primarily because I actually, I don't like the restrictions on them. So that's, I'm like, sort of, but my understanding is that there are sort of other places and it's a little more complicated. You have to have your iPhone or iPad sort of like jailbroken, you need to sort of, I'm sure go into some particularly sketchy, even sketchier than my space. It is just, you don't want to jailbreak any phone that requires jailbreaking. That's right. Which means that the jail works. Yeah. Yeah, yes. I mean, it is... There seem to be no shortage of other people who are perfectly interested in spending their time on that. I mean, Apple is right there in whatever this next stage of the digital dialectics because it looks like this super creative company. It's what creativity looks like now. And yet... We all think different. We all think different. Fascinating. Yeah, I think a more exciting example here for me is somebody like Louis C.K. who released his stand-up tour of Five Box to the community directly. Just totally bypassing distribution channels, publishers, and being kind of showing that this is a viable model to just totally... And if some say there's another say he rose to prominence and got people eager to pay the Five Box thanks to all the traditional ways of succeeding, having your comedy central show, et cetera, et cetera. But... Fair point. Fair point. We need to stop. Virginia, thank you for sharing your journey with us from the days of glowing amber to now. Keep it a personal. And for recreating in our room the magic that for those of you out on the webcast, thanks for listening in, but it's just not the same. We'll see you in cyberspace tonight. Thank you.