 Thank you very much. I'm going to stand up so I can see all of you and I'm told if I speak loudly I'll be audible on the things, on the microphone, and Colin's back there with the thumbs up. I can also do things in stereo, I can kind of find things back and forth. The title is the China Zero, which is a provocative one. It sounds a little bit negative, but it's a way of kind of summing up a bunch of different things that I've been thinking about over the years. This is a whole joke that, you know, give me a minute and tell me everything you know. I'm going to give you like an hour and tell you a lot of what I picked up by studying the open source world and a number of other subjects over the last few years. So with that we have a lot of metaphors for the now already and I study those and I'm wondering why we would want one more with this giant zero idea that I'm going to float at you. And I think it's because it helps us understand the best one, the best metaphor that is better and I'll tell you what that is in a little bit and also why the worst ones are giving us huge problems. We've sort of I think suffered a little bit of a defeat around net neutrality. I think a lot of us feel that way and I'd like to explore that and why some other things are trouble. For example, as we know, as Senator Tessie was himself told us, the Internet is not just something you dump something on, it's not a big truck, it's a series of tubes. And then as Rick Felton came along and said, it is right, as a matter of fact, experts talk about pipes all the time, is the gap between tubes and pipes really so large. And it isn't when you reduce everything to content. Now this funny thing happened, I'm sure it happened to Dan and others among us who were journalists. A few years ago we were writers and then all of a sudden out of nowhere we found out we were content providers, you know, like our words got strapped into a large package and sold at Costco. Like they had like a finite quantity that we shoved in a tube and shoved down or put on a truck or whatever. You can make this finite distinction between pipes and tubes and so forth where you're still talking about content. I think it's a problem. So, for example, if you take a subject, it's not too oxymoronic to do a search for FCC indecency at the same time, I would hope. By the way, my identity, we'll talk about identity later, on Google Gmail is a needed drink at gmail.com. And that's because I eliminated my own identity by incompetently registering myself four or five times in a row, eliminating old Searles and views Searles and Doc Searles. So, if you look up FCC indecency, you get this, you get this page. And if you look at the URL, you find it's, you know, the bottom packet of it, the file is called content ID HTML. This little jpeg is called content.jpeg. And, you know, there's a certain kind of content called identity and decency and profanity, which is against the law. And suddenly, against the law, they tell you, they go around and say it's not protected by the First Amendment. Well, that raises the question, why wouldn't it be? So, how can you reconcile the First Amendment with the FCC? You've got the First Amendment here, and you've got, you know, content.jpeg over here. What it is. And so, you've got the law, you know, Congress doesn't make no law of bridging the freedom of speech of the press. Then how can Congress make laws of bridging the freedom of speech in broadcasts? Defining broadcasting as transporting content and not as speech and doing it for like over seven years. So here we've got giant tubes. On the other hand, we have, you know, something like that, a free speech area has been set aside, some small place to do your free speech. But the difference isn't trivial, it's actually critical. It's actually critical to the way we think. Broadcasting those content through the stuff we call media, media is a medium, it's kind of a through sort of thing. Meanwhile, speech happens in a place, and there's a difference between those two. And as we see from the FCC, content is not protected, and nor are non-press media, while the press is still safe. For now, because at least that part is in the First Amendment of the Constitution, they're covered. Well, what about the press on the net? Well, it kind of depends on it, doesn't it? It depends on whether or not you're shipping something, whether or not you're speaking. So, you know, fortunately so far the net is not just a truck or a series of tubes. In fact, we commonly use at least four metaphors when we think of talking about the net. When we talk about content that's going through a medium or transported with a protocol, for example, it's about shipping. And if we architect or design or construct something, we build sites with addresses that get traffic and so forth, it's about real estate. And if we write or we author something called pages that we browse, it's about writing. And if we perform for an audience that has an experience, it's about theater. Of course, we can mix these things up. You talk about delivering and experience, for example, and kind of mix shipping and theater at the same time with those. But all these things are going on in our heads at once, and all of them give rise to different regulatory regimes. They give rise to different assumptions. They allow us to talk completely past each other. So, that's how we mix our metaphors. So, for example, this is a new thing that Dave Weiner came up with. It's actually been around for a little bit, but he gave us some wonderful metaphor for it. Dave, by the way, deserves credit for a whole big pile of things. But one of them is the same idea called River of News, which is where you simply take a web page and you pour it into a form that looks good on a handheld device. This is a Nokia 770 handheld Linux computer. And this is my Trio 700, which I just, by the way, I just stopped paying for this. It's probably 30 bucks a month to Verizon to be able to look at the web on your thing or 10 cents a kilobyte or something. Talk about tubes and trucking and the rest of it. That's what they are. So, River of News is this metaphor for fees to mobile devices, for example, and they combine transport, publishing, and even agricultural metaphors in that with fees. So, which is best for us in the net itself? And for us who comprise it? So, that's the question I've thought about a lot. Before we go there, I want to dig deeper into the metaphor thing, because I think there is a way of combining these metaphors that allow us to win a few more of these net neutrality-type arguments in government. It also makes sense to each other as well as we try to build the net out. So, here's cognitive linguistics 101 in one slide. So, it goes like this. Metaphors are actually the real matrix. How many people here saw the matrix? Have you all seen it? You know? Yeah. I have to go see it. It's my favorite movie of all time. Fabulous movie. It's a great metaphor movie. That's George Lakoff, who's a professor of kind of linguistics and cognitive science. And Berkeley, he's a friend and a mentor of mine. And what he changes is that we, in fact, think and talk in terms of other subjects. In other words, we borrow whole vocabularies for everything we're talking about all the time, whether we like it or not. And those subjects are likely to be talked about, but they're not. The same thing is what we're talking about. Meaning that this equals that because this is not that. It's like that, but it's not exactly that. And this is all unconscious. And it also has an irony behind all understanding, but not necessarily beyond it. So, let's unpack that. So, every metaphor is a box of borrowed words. So, we call that a concept. It's a conceptual metaphor. And we use these concepts to frame our understanding of everything. So, for example, time and life. Okay, so, we talk about time using a completely different thing that's not time. Anybody want to give me a quick guess what that is? See how unconscious it is? A smart people together. What is it? Space. Space? Yeah. It's a bunch of things. It's actually money. You know, we say, we waste it. We save it. We spend it. We throw it away. We put it aside. You know, we invest it. We borrow the language of money when we talk about time. We do it completely unconsciously for life. What would it be? Well, amazing. It's travel. And we say, for if there's a rival or death as departure, choices across roads, careers are passed. We pull up the wagon. We get stuck in a rut. We move in a fast lane. We cut them off at the pass. We get lost in the woods. You cannot begin to talk about life without borrowing the language of travel. It can't be done. It can't be done. Endless poetry has been written about this with this without anybody ever examining it. We can't help doing that. So we get to politics. And this is, George has become a great hero of the Democratic Party. He wrote a book called, Why Think of an Elephant? And back in 1995, he had a really terrific book, which I think is his best book, called Moral Politics with Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't. The second edition of it was How Liberals Can Serve the State, but I really like the first title better. He says, we can ball frame politics in terms of the nation as a family. So here's George. And here's the nation. And here's a perfect family from 1952, namely mine. That's me right there. Sitting with my father, fresh back from World War II. It was his whole, the 50s was really great. Everybody's parents had exactly the same experience. It was really wonderful. That's why we idealized the 50s, I think, to some extent. But anyway, he came to the conclusion, that conclusion, that he framed things as the nation's family. After he heard this, he heard, why should the best people be punished? And he heard that from this guy, Dan Quayle, who was a former vice president of the U.S. and a great golfer and not a deep thinker. But anyway, that's what Dan said to the Republican National Committee in 1992. And he was talking about graduated taxation, whether rich people pay more than the poor people do. And that's been part of the tax code since forever. But he doesn't like that. A lot of conservatives don't like that. And it was an applause line. And he got a lot of, everybody was clapping. And George was appalled. He said, wait a minute, why are the best people, what is this about this? Why are the best people the richest? Why is taxation punishment? And where did the vocabulary get borrowed from in order to make sense of this? And he realized, wait a minute, I'm talking to a linguist and I'm kind of a birthday liberal guy to figure out what this is because these people are talking sense to each other and I'm not getting it. So he discovered this. He said, the conservative box of words actually has a consistent set of family ideals. And those are these. When they talk, it's all, the whole Boy Scout Oak is in here. You have character and virtue and discipline and toughness and grit and competition, hard work. Property is important. You get rewarded. You punish the evildoers. You bring them to justice. And common sense, very conservative. I'd love to talk about common sense. The liberals have the same box, but it's a different family box. They'll talk about fairness and compassion and empathy and mercy, renewable energy, alternatives, fulfillment, happiness. They'll talk about justice too, but they mean something a little bit different by that. Self-respect, caring, that's the liberal box of words. And for both of them, those two boxes are kind of like what you showed both at the same time. They're kind of like chalkboards on the, figures on the chalkboards of each other's minds, you know? And so naturally, a chunk of neutrality, oh, everything's evil, the equal, and let's have neutrality, that does not necessarily play with your conservatives, which is one of the reasons I think that neutrality was an unfortunate choice of word. So they think in terms of different idealized families. So here's your conservative ideal, because you've got John Wayne, you know? Well, pilgrim, plenty already. And I took this from some, you know, some place on the left who knows from violating copyright. Anyway, that's the switch called the strict father model. The strict father model is an idealized family headed by a strict father who teaches a certain way, and so they come down like this. So the idea behind here is, behind the conservative worldviews, you start from the realization of the world's a dangerous place and also competitively, the strong, protective, morally strong leader who stands up to evil and has these virtues that you teach to your children, you know, which are strength, obedience, loyalty, respect, self-discipline, deferral of goals, the goodness of wealth, freedom, that's in both of the systems. And the liberals, on the other hand, come from the idea that the world's a good place and that children are born good and they need to be made better. Original sin is not necessarily part of the liberal worldview. Highest values are empathy and caring and responsibility, community. That freedom's in there too. A point that George makes is that, in fact, a lot of the same words are in both values systems. They're just ordered differently. They're prioritized in a much different way because they come from a different idealized view of the world. So, here's my point. I just wanted to use that as an example because I'm going to really be talking about the net and not necessarily about politics, so that does play. And I think we can learn something from the net and try an example. The advantage, which is that a dangerous world is more interesting than a nice one. Children may be born good, but your band of children make much better literature. And it's a lot simpler too. It's an excuse to employ. This is the most important thing. The most powerful metaphor of all, which is, of course, war. As George S. Patton said, compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor are frankness and significance. George C. Scott put it at least in the movie. God help me, I do love it though. You know what he's talking about. So, no box of words is more handy than a war box, as Dan knows or any journalist knows. You've got this box of words that are all about war. You can bring them into anything. They're really handy. You can bring them into sports. You can bring them into politics. You can bring them into sociology. It doesn't matter what it is, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on whatever it is, terrorism, of course, you know, it's a terrible thing. The world's a dangerous place. War on terrorism makes complete sense to a lot of people. So, switch out of politics. So let's go back to the net again. So now that I've explained linguistics a little bit, you know, which metaphor do we want if we're going to try and emphasize one over the other or two over the other. And I think it's these two. I think that it's real estate. It's the sense that the net is a place and at the same time that it's a place that supports a lot of things, including speech. So speech happens in a place. So it happens to be real estate. So it's a place for free speech through writing and hopefully equally protected forms. And there's nothing wrong, of course, with the other metaphors. We're going to be using them anyway, but we can't help doing that. But we need to stand on and for the net as a place where free speech happens. And because we need to get the conservative majority of this in Congress as a place where free enterprise happens as well. That's something we've never emphasized for a while, but we need to which together appeal, I think, to both political framing systems. So about speech and content. I think speech informs and it's not just about delivering content. So we go back to Dan or we go to George. And the difference between informing and delivering content is critical because information, we talk about information as if it's a commodity. I'm going to deliver information to you. I want some information from you. Folks are filled with information as if it's a solid thing, yet it still arrives from this verb to inform, which is to write and turn from the verb to form, which means that we actually form each other. So if Colin tells me something I didn't hear before and I didn't know before, that's interesting to me, I'm changed by that. I can't now suddenly say, I'm going to wipe that out of my mind. I have that information, I'm going to put it away now. I don't have that information anymore. No, I'm changed by it. We are all constantly changed by each other, reformed by each other, which means that in fact, in other words, we are all authors of each other. And that's what authority does. That's where authority comes from. So it's no mistake that when Google in the first place talked about how page ranks work, they took inbound links, or the number of inbound links in the incoming tree of links to links to links as a form of authority, like votes for authority. And Techerati did the same thing. I was involved in Techerati, still am involved in Techerati to some degree, and I'm under advisory board, I'm good friends with them there. And they wanted to know is there another word other than authority they could use to measure how well people come out, you know how well the results are sorted when you start narrowing it down. Because that's one of the things that they do in theirs. And this is something I searched for Dan here. He wrote about Dan this morning in Brickland right over here. And here it is. Techerati actually indexes that stuff pretty fast. So, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. Anyway, authority I think is a right that we give certain others to form and shape what we know. So we don't just find the best information, find what's best qualified to form or author what we know. So, they're all generative. This is a word that I got from Jonathan Zittrain who's not here but maybe Jonathan you're watching right now. He was just in second life. He was just in second life a minute ago. Tell him we miss him in the first one. Anyway, so this is the abstract for his piece that he wrote recently. He was just last year and it's still in the works. But it's interesting to look at the metaphors used here. You know, we have we've distributed here code and content. We have audiences. We have consumers. We have markets and we have this word decisive that's a little bit that's probably as close as the lawyer part of them can get to using the war metaphor. We want a decisive victory, I suppose. So let's look at how the net is changing the generativity of the commodity we call information. And one way is that the media is no longer the only media. There's a missing half a quote there. So started with Tivo in a way. We had some control over what we got there. Now suddenly the TV is turned into the iPod and everybody seems to be podcasting, NPR and so forth. YouTube is huge. This is a this is a video I shot with my nine-year-old kid last year from a launch from Vandivert near where I live in Santa Barbara. It's got piles of comments on it now. It's been viewed a couple thousand times. Some of the comments are in Japanese. I knew we meant to make that like a TV show but it sort of is one. The point is that the big trend isn't more content. It's consumers becoming producers. That's what's happened now. So for example in photography all of us here I suppose are digital photographers at this point, right? I mean I mean he was just still working in the film. If you're shooting digital photographs you're really not consumers anymore. You're producers. We're all producers. Enabling production by everybody is changing whole industries from places where one big producer or a few big producers that comprise silos are doing things to where everybody is participating in some way. So for example before you used to buy film take it to Costco you got back your prints. You showed them in albos or drawers in a place and they disappeared. Now we put them up on Flickr or in a place like Flickr. So here's this piece that was in Newsweek a while ago of Katarina and Stuart and basically they came up with this really cool way to put photos on the web and as a result people like me never cross Kodak anymore. Kodak is not part of my life and Kodak is one of the largest patent holders in the history of the world. If these guys had an end run around them it enabled everybody rather than just one big puppet. So what's happening is that openness and cooperation are turning photography into this truly free marketplace. It isn't just Luigi and Sony and Nikon anymore. It's everybody. So I've got right now let's see 11,000 326 figures on Flickr including these that I shot out of a fire that was near Santa Barbara when it was flying out yesterday morning and they also show up over here. This is a company called Tableau and I don't see Antonio Rodriguez here. He was going to try and make it. Antonio is a friend. He lives here in town and he came up with this company called Tableau and because Flickr has a pile of open APIs and because they treat my data as my data and not their data as much as possible they just open it up. Anybody else, any other company wants to come in and take all of that stuff all of those photographs and we'll call it content. Take all my photographs, all that data and move it over to their thing so I can work on it over there. You can do that. So here's the same thing. This is the latest Tableau idea this morning where I said Tableau does a bunch of stuff that Flickr doesn't. And so does Tableau and so we have a bigger marketplace for photography because there's this openness that's going on between these different companies. So they both see the pictures as my data and not theirs and they see the market as more than your choice of silo. So here's another indication point here too. This is La Conchita. La Conchita is a town on the coast of California that's below a mountain that's rising faster than most volcanoes because it's not a volcano so there was a series of landslides last year that actually killed some people right here and I'm kind of into geology and I wanted to get a good picture of that when I was coming into Santa Barbara one day and so I took this one and somebody came along and said hey, I'll give you $200 for that picture and they did and it paid for four years a war of Flickr. And they're bringing I think of about $400 worth of pictures on Flickr without even trying. So I'm trying to be a professional photographer here but even for that I'm intending to that's what's happening. And the same thing is happening in video. Here's Rocket Boom. It's an older picture that goes Amanda on it but at that time this in July when it lasted this life there were more than $300,000 downloads a day and CNN at the same time had a fraction of that in downloads and the difference in costs from a few hundred dollars a show to advertising eBay for $40 a week that's their cost for $40 a week they're selling advertising for $40 a week and the cost of producing a show is trivial compared to what the cost of producing CNN is. So this is a question I asked last winter that was pretty interesting. I go to CES, the consumer electronics show every winter and I like to ask questions of the guys that make the big stuff that the rest of us can't make and what that's going to do in the world and that's one of the pictures coming out of Santa Barbara too. One of the things I found is the price of the 1080p screen will be under $1,000 a cost of the end of 2007 may already be there this is already there and the 1080p that's the top level of the old high definition used to be like this really advanced thing well the FCC's rules went as far as 1080p that's the most we've ever imagined in 1996 well that's where we're there now and under $1,000 a cost of the price of the 1080p camcorder will be under $2,000 a lot of the recent Star Wars movie were shot on 1080p video cameras kind of what was secretly they wanted to see if people could tell it wasn't filmed they couldn't that was the 1080p camera that cost like $40,000 that camera now is about 5 it's coming down and the price of computing projection here will be under production rather here will be under $3,000 so any number of us can now suddenly be people who make whatever capacity for producing movies is getting within the reach of almost anybody so the question here though is what happens to the distribution system for this stuff because the capacity isn't there to move that stuff around right now cable systems aren't going to do it and the carriers on top of that don't want you to produce and distribute video this is from my house I mean we've actually cranked it up now to we're over 5 megabits in one direction but we're only 742 on the other side and by the way in order to get this I had to pay for 10 but every provision to get 10 on the downside but every provision to get in order to get a mega on the upside and they put a provision either in Santa Barbara because we're kind of at the back of their of their list of their places they're going to build out in any case they're built for asymmetry from a few producers to a million consumers and they still cripple the upstream service even though the demand for upstream is going up I talked to one of the local the guy who runs the public affairs office for a local cable company in Santa Barbara we had this big meeting there's a room filled with about as many people as they're here many of them Hollywood producers that didn't that wanted fiber level connectivity so they didn't have to go down to Century City or to Burbank in order to produce computer generated animation and other kind of backend stuff there was they have down there they wanted to be able to do this over online they're willing to pay for it and this guy told me look people just want to consume TV the internet is basically gravy and it uses word but they're basically gravy on the TV service they monitor use and nobody's really using upstream and I said how can you tell if you're not providing it and that was lost on they're built for television so and they're saying this could choke the net and choke them this is a piece really planted at the Associated Press I mean it's pretty much intact from the cable or telephone industry they see the net as another TV channel it's just one way content that's the way they see things and the problem wasn't still is that they go like a respected net and that they're in the business to create and maintain fillable events which is a term I owe to Bob and I think it's true I mean horizon actually wants to charge me for every single picture I move from my camera to another camera I'm just moving a file but you know it's as if they had a meter on your hard drive it makes no sense whatsoever but if they can do it they will so there's nothing wrong with it as long as it doesn't compromise the net itself but we have a problem if it isn't clear to most of us what the net is so it's kind of interesting if we think of the net as a utility among other utilities and that's what a lot of the municipalities are calling it, they're calling it the fifth utility and there's a pile of others that could qualify for the other four electrical, roads sewage, waste treatment, water the rest of them thinking of it as yet another utility but you can explain any citizen can explain what the water system is or what the electrical system is so most people the net is still an extra bill you get along with the telephone or you get along with the cable and that's a problem they ask you what is the net, you're going to get an answer like you got from Senator Stevens you know, well it's just this thing I have, right it's not clear so that's where we get to the jumping zero and so this is where, and I'm going to try this out on you guys because I thought of this the other day and I don't know what better place to talk about it from here Craig is responsible I think more than anybody else for the success of Novel in the 80s and he did this by reconceiving what a net work was if you went back to you know, took the way back machine to say about 1980 there were magazines about this thing called data communications and I don't know, communications week and I think network were looking around it all of them were talking about omni-net versus deck-path versus four of us there were all 50 different kinds of Ethernet all of them required their own cabling and so forth and Craig came along to Novel and said well why don't we just think of the net or a network rather as a set of services so you need file and you need print so we'll just give you file and print and he kind of blew up the entire conversation that had been going on around network and changed the game completely it was pretty neat to watch and Craig by the way says what is the Ethernet business today by the way Ethernet business is approximately zero and I was trying to protect it so he compares the net to a hollow sphere there's Craig and there's the best I could do with a hollow sphere and he says if you've got an architecture that's all ends which is what David Reed and the other guys wrote in the and-to-and architecture piece from way long ago and we most of us agree is the basic architecture of the net you've got an end-to-end relationship between anybody who's on the net or any service or any node that's on the net and if you listen to David Eisenberg and another alumnus of Bergen who was still at AT&T and got fired for writing and has had a really nice consulting career talking about it ever since and changing the world he's doing a great job so he came up with the idea well it's got to be stupid in the middle so Craig says well you know if you're looking at this geometrically a hollow sphere is you know the nature of a sphere is where any two points can see and see each other across it's a pretty cool thing and it is in almost a literal way a world of ends and so David Weinberger and I wrote a piece called World of Ends in 2003 the point of which is to make this clear I'm not sure if you're here trying to make the case again but the net isn't only a world of ends I just want to take this off for a second because it's a really cool thing a really cool program that my kid actually found on the computer I didn't even know it was still here it's this thing here because it's too big right now but it's called 3D Weather Globe and the cool thing about it is you can actually adjust it to make it transparent and you can see the you know see through to the other side and it kind of brings in whatever the cloud cover is right now but the interesting thing about it when I was looking at it and talking to my kid about it let's see let's get back into where I was is that the world that we know the world we're on right now in many ways is the same the inside of this globe is stupid you get down below the part that you can actually own which is just a very very thin crust that you're dealing with just something that produces gravity it's a great big mass in the middle it's essentially, productively speaking it's hollow but the net in a way is our improvement the way Craig puts it is he invented a second world that we've only begun to terraform a whole new world to our specifications that overcomes some of the difficulties we have with distance in the physical world so Mark Andreessen when I interviewed him when I started with Linux Journal I started actually in 1996 but in 1998 Netscape open sourced Mozilla and I had a long interview with Mark it's the first time I met him and you drop this line technology trends start with technologists they don't start with marketing people they don't start with CEOs they start with technologists they start with individual technologists scratching their own itch doing something like that I wondered what were technologists up to when they started this world and these are some of them you know a lot of their names and I think what they were doing was and I actually had that set on here yeah there is I think they were building to support civilization I don't think it was all just the profit motive I think there was an idea behind here that together was about supporting what we call civilization and civilization doesn't all move at the same speed I love this graphic which I got from the law now organization Stuart Brand has used it a few times and it not only illustrates how the various layers of civilization move at different speeds but also kind of the dependencies involved you know culture sits on nature and governance sits on culture and infrastructure sits on governance and you've got fashion and commerce going on at the top at the highest speed that's actually sort of the surface of the business earth where we pay attention to things that's sort of the weather that's going on and I think the next founders weren't coming from up there they weren't coming from fashion and commerce they were coming from down here and infrastructure and infrastructure is right at the middle of these huge conflicts that we're having it's because from above certain old commercial interests wanted to govern it and from below the technologies wanted to govern itself and for nature and culture to drive and support it this is what Larry Lessig has been yelling at these guys for a long time getting involved getting interested in politics because the guys up here are going to try and kill what you're trying to make down here so I think infrastructure is in fact the next geology and here's how it supports what relies on it it has no secrets it's free it occurs in human nature which is the nature that's busy building the net and this is a principle we call NGA we wrote about it in World Events and it's my observation basically after working in the next journal for a while on what the value system was and it's simplest form behind open source and free software which is nobody owns it everybody can use it and anybody can improve it and this last thing is really where human nature differs from the periodic table and geology and and the physical world and of course technically speaking it's a lot of it is actually owned and not everybody can only use it but this principle here has everything to do with why open source is kicking ass in the world so we just don't understand infrastructure and we have this Edward Whitaker of AT&T the only picture I could find it was really a problem and Jack Valente formerly the MPAA they don't know where it comes nowhere care within it came from or what it means to civilization they only understand content and distribution they don't understand the infrastructure that forms and changes faster than business and fashion and I got from Rob Blazer a real network so when I showed him this I actually I showed a earlier version of this to Tim O'Reilly who said you have to show this to Rob Blazer and run me to the point he said yes what happened what happened was that these guys were used to this stuff changing slowly along came the net and along came open source and free software and lots of autonomy by individuals it kind of yanked the rug out from under these guys they didn't know what to do with it because suddenly like nature changed faster than expected so they feel threatened by it naturally they want to uncontrol that's inherently uncontrollable and of course they naturally wanted to bill was naturally free in the meantime the techies want business infrastructure to support business so this is just a collection of shots of techies these are I don't know how many people are familiar with Jabber a few of you the more technical among you Jabber is kind of open source instant messaging this was the Jabber team about four years ago the average age was 18 the old man here was Jeremy Miller who came up with Jabber and the name and I think it was 22 at the time and already had like three kids they're you know they call meetings and you don't have to get permission of this guy's mom for the build-up I think one of these guys is like 13 or 14 you know really getting a lot of skies but what they wanted to do was invent something that would support everybody and not just themselves like wait a minute our choice of silos isn't working for us here AOL versus MSN versus Yahoo versus whatever is failing let's get something here that actually works for everybody and that so I think infrastructure supports markets we talk about markets all the time and markets happen up here and there's this issue of opposing perspectives so while the commercial interest often does see the free and open sources of infrastructure the free software and open source techies that were down here and that I deal with a lot often don't see the creative nature and accomplishments of commercial interest because an awful lot of creativity happens up here so there's a perspective on this that I got from Craig Burton and as well Jamie Lewis who now lives in the Burger Group which is David from Craig Craig observed that in the open source world we often make this distinction he thinks is false between open and proprietary he thinks it actually collabs the distinction here that the opposite of open is closed the opposite of proprietary is public domain and that we actually want something that works up here where you've got open and public domain as infrastructure we want to be able to freely create and use infrastructure so it is a I can unpack this a little bit more but there's an awful lot of stuff that gets started here and ends up over here and that's actually a strategic way to approach creating infrastructure so an interesting question is how these fit together so we've got two different kind of models this is the civilization model that I just talked about and the Burton model here and I think if you rock this one forward on this both of them have infrastructure in it you get something that looks like this where you've got infrastructure down here you have commerce up here open and public domain down here proprietary and closed up here infrastructure is supporting commerce from below and you have commerce contributing to infrastructure from above that's sort of a natural way Tim O'Reilly calls it forming humus so we have we invent the spreadsheet, we try to make money with the spreadsheet and now the spreadsheet is kind of a generic thing and WikiCalp is forming over here and home networking talks doing cool stuff with taking thoughts about that to whole new dimensions but there's a natural relationship that ought to be happening here that really is symbiotic and good for everybody at all levels and I think we need to understand that a little better and commoditization commoditization is this idea in the software world, especially in the part of it that gets funded commoditization is like this terrible end state that is devoutly to be feared by every start you don't want your idea to get commoditized but in fact actually commoditization is a good thing we would not have the entire construction industry without it commodities are actually there actually is money in commodities Don Marty says information doesn't want to be free, information wants to be 6.95 there is some friction in making whatever it is and there's money to be made wherever there's that friction so in any case commoditization is what you do for your markets you do for your customers, for yourself commoditization and on the other hand this is I think how hollywood and necarious you take your patents and your copyrights and your IP laws and you push them down in infrastructure and that in turn supports everything that sits on top of it so commerce governs infrastructure you get commerce down under here and the natives can go to hell of course the people are producing all this nature down here and the content purpose is that they get familiar plans for the next natives and they go do your kind of the open thing over in here when we do the real business out and I've talked about a few slides here but if you read a lot of the even what some legislators are writing to citizens about when they're talking about the freedom of the net and so forth you can do that over here but really we just support business and business is not about that and the nets about business so I think the win for everybody is a good place you know a technologist made it the rest of us are generating it every day we need to finish unleashing our generative powers and that means going beyond seeing markets transactions or even conversations and so this is where I get to talk about markets I've thought a lot about markets over the years and we talk about them all the time and this is what gave rise to clue training to some degree because David Weinberger and Chris Locke I found ourselves this is like in 1998 on the phone a lot talking about how crazy it was that billions of dollars was going to fund new internet companies doing exactly what people did before portals, malls retail establishments that were kind of replicas of what we found in the physical world and using the same jargon and you talk about seats and eyeballs and the rest of it so the first thesis of the clutury manifest was markets of conversations and by that we meant we often may ask what did you mean by that so I'll tell you we're saying that markets were not just all these other things that we call markets bowls and bears, invisible hands forces, battlefields by the way the metaphor for markets on Wall Street is entirely natural it's all animals and feelings and impulses and the rest of it and impulses because it's the war thing we'll talk about markets as demographics we'll talk about these regions we'll talk about the China market and China wants the same thing sectors and of course it's a synonym for demand it's a market for something and essentially all of it though is stuff that reduces to transactions and not much more than that and so I'll repeat myself so what we said was that before there were all these other things markets were these real places where people gathered to do business and make culture so after clutrain came out that was like clutrain in three minutes or less after it came out we got this really helpful feedback from the real marketplace and here's one of them this is Eric Raymond who's in many ways the father of the open source movement he certainly did more than anybody else and also from people I don't have pictures of what is it a priest I know, Father Sean O'Lara who came to Palo Alto from Ireland by way of density and a guy named Pastor Shio Ajiboya in Nigeria who I found myself sitting next to on a plane it was one of the most interesting characters I've ever met in my life and there's Eric but they all said the same thing which was interesting they all said well yeah markets are conversations good for kind of like a middle-class guy from the first world but over where we come from in the less developed world that's kind of an obvious thing that markets are conversations yep yep even with transactions you kind of discover the price inside of a conversation so there's more than that all of them said this markets are also relationships you know so and of course markets are these three things I mean I think we can actually take when we talk about markets we can kind of isolate it into these sweet different baskets and one of the things that Shio Ajiboya told me was you know in your B schools and so we kind of like have a pyramid where the largest part of it is transactions and smaller than that is conversations and the tiniest part is relationships whereas where I come from relationships and the biggest part transactions are the smallest part there are any keys you've got all three but I think the killer app is actually relationships it's what people do with people and not just these other parts and I think we're just beginning to understand how killer that can be and the problem is the traditional search for example if we just look actually there's it I skipped some stuff here for time I think relationships are happening and what I'm calling the live web and the live web I think is very different from the static web so far it's got the real estate part of it it doesn't have the light that's going on on top of the real estate so if we search for sites that are designed and built that addresses basically you know there's a way of doing that and Google's very good at it but the you know but what's happening in the live web we're blogging and podcasting and conversation and relationships happen and just Google and for that matter Yahoo or MSN and the guys actually search that stuff it's kind of interesting because Google actually has blog search how many people here use Google blog search three of you and how many people use technoradi a lot more Google blog search is Google's technoradi and this is what it looks like you go there it looks Google like and they make these interesting distinctions you can search blogs or you can search the web why is there a difference you know that's kind of a big whom I would think so I think the reason that they say that is because this is in fact branching off of that and that's going on right now the live web is branching off the static web and it's the branching is actually when it's happening between space and time so this is space you know you search for something on Google it's static and what you're searching for on Google blog search is something that's changing over time so in the way those are built what Google does is sends out its bots to search through billions of websites seeing what changed that's what they're looking for what's changed and what technoradi Google blog search does is just listen to RSS feeds and then they'll index those things only look for what's live what's happening in time so one does one and one does the other looking at syndicated feeds and indexing just those there's an interesting thing technoradi's goal and the Google people thought it was the same thing there's a time to index of under one minute and that's what I was kind of exploring by looking at something I wrote about Dan this morning just under one minute between actually writing something and seeing it in an index so they're responding to science for life, science of life so what are the other differences you know there's one is this you know the static thing you're wanting to traffic there the information time but the main difference is the live web is about time and it's about people and it's people's time and you know people who write blogs and author other journals I think it's just the beginning the bloggers are kind of the tip of the live bird what's going to ultimately happen with all the relationships we're going to have on the net that they expect to be syndicated so on the one hand the static web is this hate stack and this is going to get technical here so this is a essentially a unix file a straw in the hate stack what happened when the web was created and kind of a virtue of the web is that it was completely chaotic there was no directory when Novell created a land it had a directory service all of these kind of advanced features the web was born without any of that it was just pure chaos so we actually need a vast huge fraction of millions of servers looking at everything to give you something that's like the directory and that's what Google gives you there's everything to the right and this first slash is just chaos but we're used to it it seems like a normal thing to have that chaos out there and that's when we need search engines but the live web was organized chronologically this is a search for reboot 8 back when that was going on and Technorati sorts things out across time and they give you a little graph of that and you know and here's a virtual URL structure if you look at all the ways the world could be organized this is an interesting thing about what blogging has done you can organize things chronologically or categorically or alphabetically or geospatially there's a limited number of ways you can organize things the web was actually organized in none of those ways until blogging came along blogging actually has a virtual structure to it it says you've got your blog and there's your month day post and that's a permalink that particular post that's an implicit organizational structure to the live web so far that is different than the rest of it it's not like the static web it actually has a time aspect to it it's what people do at the time so it's not any staff it's a history of people and I believe Technorati by the way has archived everything people have done across time in blogging ever since they started is searchable in a much more careful and deliberative way than anything you can do on Google today so what's going on with the live web I think it is one great big declaration of independence is in the sense of people who are independent this is what Chris Locke wrote that actually galvanized this getting going on on the clue train manifesto we are not seeds or eyeballs or end users of consumers human beings which is a grass field it's a 1998 or 9 and it's still taking a long time for us to get our heads around that anyway it's the human side of it but it's also where the money comes from this is where I'm going to start talking about what I call the intention economy and what I'd like to explore with some research here at Burtman we'll get to that in a minute so on the live web the demand side is actually supplying itself so what's happening in the static web too is slower and it's happening in lots of men's supported movements including open source but the idea of supplying yourself this is really what happened with open source guys scratching their own itches making something that wasn't there before it's a huge DIY movement but anyway it's a lot it's more than just blogging it's these other things podcasting, wikis, messaging tagging tagging is a new thing that just came along in like the last year and a half you know meeting but fine that's the that's a part that we haven't really built out yet so this is a cartoon by a human cloud he's a gaping void dichotomies it's a fabulous cartoonist and a very funny guy so let's talk about blogging so I think the interesting thing about blogging and this goes, this speaks to relationships and it speaks to the non-content expanding nature of what we're doing together inside of relationships and inside of business it's provisional, it's not finished or final when I'm writing a blog I have a very different frame of mind than when I'm writing an article for Lennox Journal or I'm writing something that's a serious piece of you know like when I was writing Clutrain or when I was writing a chapter from a Riley book for example there's a voice that you use, it's homiletic and you're standing in your pulpit and you're announcing this is true and this is final and I've studied it and this is my opinion and it's so but when you're blogging very often you're doing something else you're saying I think this or I just saw that many ways that's what I'm doing here so industrial publishers create these finished works which is a good thing but it's no longer the only thing these independent publishers, bloggers are creating these provisional works they're works in progress so and this is a metaphor I got in a conversation with George Lakoff George had been down to Santa Barbara and given a speech to the democratic elders of the town to give them some hope that the democratic party had to get their vocabulary right would be able to finally defeat the Karl Rove what he does much better than the neighbor will but anyway afterwards where George was actually stuck at the airport, we were having lunch and George said well Doc's kind of a big time blogger and and that's what George said then the guy said well what's a blogger and George explained it and it was good but it wasn't quite there and so the guy said because he's a good liberal and he funds this and George's thing tent he said what you need to do is fight for women's rights and end war and he listed a whole bunch of liberal causes and I said well that's really nice so those are rocks that you push up a hill and those are nice rocks to push but that's not what I do when I blog I actually roll snowballs down the hill it's much easier or I just try to add some snow to some under snow that other people are wrong and fail and I think that's what the best of blogging is like you roll out this idea others add to it and it keeps rolling and it grows and gets somewhere and when it does it's not just yours anymore so the idea that blogging is rolling a snowball people have written about this it's had a snowball effect of its own you can't really own it and open source works this way as well it's no longer just your idea so podcasting is this great snowball example in late I see I wrote that podcast currently brought up 24 results on Google at that time it's 4 million as of sometime I think actually it's now in 2005 I think it's 95 million it's probably well over 100 million at this point for podcasting and it's becoming an industry just out of nowhere almost literally there's a provisionality there's a partialness to what everybody who has anything to do with podcasting is offering to it this webcast that becomes a podcast that's going out today has elements to it and it's not final it's an idea that people are going to take and run with so I think it's a new economy that's growing around the live web and it's the same as the old economy only its network and this networked economy power isn't distributed it's actually re-originated and it originates with those who converse and who relate and not just by the way for those who transact which is the filter we've always been looking at economy through the live web economy we have a value chain being replaced by a value constellation that term by the way came from a couple guys Norman and Ramirez are actually both French and wrote a piece in Harvard Business Review in 1993 called the rise of the value constellation there's something like the value constellation but the interesting thing is I think there are only stars here and the wide open space around the value constellation is freedom it's an environment of independence enterprise and lots of other good stuff that appeals to both Republicans and to Democrats a loner together and I think it will help to drive what I call the intention effect so the intention economy is something not many people have talked about and I came up with this idea when O'Reilly had a conference this spring and it was about the attention economy and there were a lot of speakers on stage were talking about the same stuff that were in 1998 we had to get eyeballs we had to put people in pens we had to capture markets as if people were wild animals and had to be held in corrals and it was like why am I hearing this same crap that I heard a bunch of years ago and how do we get that conversation out of there were nothing wrong with getting people's attention and look at what we can do now in a networked economy we didn't have for the entire industrial age so I thought ok what is the intention intention economy would be when you're not just seats or eyeballs or consumers anymore you actually have customers who are ready to buy so what do you get when the customer's mind is big you have attention up to this one marketing is working all through here and then you decide I want to buy a Canon 5D camera and who am I going to buy it from what relationships come to play what lenses am I going to get along with that who am I going to ask for advice on that my mind is actually already made up now when the customer's mind is made up they actually have money they're actually ready to spend something so and I think this is virgin territory and it's virgin in part because it's spent so much time on energy and marketing and I was in that business for like about 20 years and I know how exhausted it is so we can't help always looking at how to get people's attention how to yell at them and the rest of it and that's not very efficient either so the interesting thing is there's actually no marketing attention it's just sales you've got marketing up to here and you've got sales out from here and we're ready so it's what you get when marketing's work is done so we have when the customer's ready to buy and it's about going to the customers and not vice versa what Don Martin, my old editor at Linux Journal, closed the upside down buyer's guide I'll publish my buyer's guide here's the stuff I want here are the conditions I have, here are the relationships I have who is going to fulfill because I have money that's going to go to that person or to that company and so you can explore that with what I call sales law number 14 which is it doesn't matter what car you want or anything like that now it's a shitty call it's better not just a shitty call and it may even be one that I had at some point and so the deal here is though I have, my car sucks I have an 85 or 80 something I never figured out what you wrote was Subaru, mine's actually red it's covered in tents so I write cars, even at home when I go someplace I write a car and so I'm a veteran rental car customer I know way too much and how much they suck so it's interesting it actually makes an actual patrol study for what I call an independent identity because they all have they don't line up at the airport in a row they all have the same size kiosks there's the same kind of weird little cast system you have Hurtson and Avis and then LMO, National and then Budget and Thrifty and Dollar and then the all-fairport, you've got Ace and Fox and the other guys they all give away the same crummy maps that don't cover the whole town they all kind of compete they all have the same lame CRM systems that know two things about you they're bad so then they all line up against the same wall and the worst thing is on the web they repeat the same thing this is actually from the United site United actually replicates the rental car experience online let's say you go to the United you click on United and you go you click on cars and you go to rent a car and you get a few extra miles for renting from budget or dollar or whatever and let's say you're with budget and you've gotten to the end you find out how much cheese I'm going to be in Cambridge for a week and they're going to charge me 200 bucks I'm going to see what Avis has and so then you go click on Avis what does it do? it actually kills the first section completely it's like you walked away from them the memory of it is actually hostile that way and I don't even know why they do it except it's familiar or I don't know what but anyway it actually replicated so I like to rent from budget for a simple reason I might get a Ford Focus and I like the Ford Focus because or similar by the way that's the other thing they are similar I got this time as a tourist but mostly what they want to make is a Chevy Kepler but that's the beaten switch thing I like the Ford Focus because it's actually a decent car you wouldn't necessarily want to buy one because they fall apart a little bit but they at least according to some records but they'll play MP3 CDs so I can burn podcasts under an MP3 CD and play it in there in fact most Fords will do that now except the Mustang and the Taurus I don't know why but identical looking radio but once it's MP3 but the other one doesn't say MP3 we played also it's a fun car to drive but the thing is that they're not interested in renting me that or renting me that so the question is what would it do for the rental car business to know what the customers' attentions are outside of their silo as well they spend less energy trying to trap and hold customers that whole marketing machine they spend more trying to meet the man and improve service and enlarge the whole marketplace and there's a few things that they would need to know about it when they have lots of relationships that might be good for you most of what they want isn't in the CRM system and they have more good ideas for you than anybody inside your company and also for themselves and everybody else the interesting part here is that the CRM system y'all know what a CRM system is it's customer relationship management every large company that retails anything has a CRM system CRM systems are relationship minimization machines essentially it's not a real relationship just a little position in the database they know as little as possible about you it's this old industrial notion that they can't break themselves free of and this is actually the death star that I want to blow up and if we can do that that would be really good we can do it with Tor who knows and I want to blow it up by showing that they can have real relationships with their actual customers go to the marketing VP for budget there's a really nice guy and I told him about some ideas here and he said I can't even imagine moving away from our CRM system I can't imagine actually wanting to know what a customer would want and I said why not it's just too hard and I said wait a minute you rent 20-30 thousand dollar products to rich people you want to improve on that a little bit no, not that interesting but somebody's going to break at some point so that's the sort of like, that's the little triangle of billiard balls that I'd like to quack from the right angle make something happen so the attention economy has inadequate infrastructure for now and why is that and I think one reason is that we still think of free market as your choice of silo for years of selling we don't want government to interfere with the free market because we have all you need you have your choice you have cable or you have DSL there it is, isn't that a free market no it's not, it's a government habitat and these are zoo animals in the government habitat they wouldn't survive in a free market place maybe some of them would but they're not built for it right now but we tend to think that if you have a choice a very narrow choice of completely silo stuff that's good enough we still look to big old industries as leaders I'm a regular on a program called the Gilmore Gang a podcast an argument we have there constantly is that some of the other guys tend to only want to talk about what the big vendors are up to if we're up to the big vendors there would be no net there would be no Berkman Center we wouldn't be in this room it's us, it's the rest of us that have created the net environment that's going to be up to us to make that happen but it's easy to look to the big guys there's nothing wrong with the big guys at all, not at all that's some wonderful stuff but they're not the whole show so we need to lead ourselves and so I think we need to do four things one is reify the net as a place built by us in Heavens for free speech, free culture thank you Larry Lessig position the net infrastructure as what supports commerce and fashion and not something that comes from those things equip individuals with tools that enable full empowerment and choice in marketplaces and that's probably the big thing that I'd like to work on here we don't have those tools yet nobody else in the identity conversation which started it by the way at a Gilmore Gang in December 31st 2004 John Clippinger, a senior fellow with Berkman volunteered Berkman as a clubhouse for that something called the Ingenity Gang hundreds of people and all the big companies are involved in that conversation by the way Microsoft is probably the biggest leader in that right now and it's because an individual named Kim Cameron and some of his friends working there that are changing that company inside and helping enormously but we don't have the tools yet we don't have the what's the means by which to the rental car marketplace hey I'm going to be in Denver I want to rent an SUV that plays MP3 CDs I have these relationships with these companies and oh by the way I'm not even going to tell you who I am yet because I want to stay anonymous up to this point with the hat tip to Mary here I think anonymity is part of how we work in the marketplace and making that work staying sufficiently anonymous while Shav over here too with Thor another an anonymity mechanism we need to be able to preserve some degree of anonymity while we go into relationships and transactions there's a very granular way that we need to be able to do this we haven't even begun to approach and I'd like to approach those things so in the personal type personal freedom and generativity to relationships and the settings that we call markets full respect to what individuals and related individuals bring so I think the ends will be the means you know the end to the end network that right as citizens are taking both business and governance to their own hands and building that infrastructure at a local level this is what muni wireless is about that's what we're doing in Santa Barbara right now that's what is a huge ongoing conversation involving Bob and a whole bunch of other people who are trying to think this stuff through and on one hand we don't get any given municipality in the US and this is kind of peculiar to the US because we have jiggered the laws in such a way and jiggered the markets in such a way that our choices right now are between two monopolists how do you how do you pay due respect to the fact that the incumbents are there they have some good things to offer there are benefits to incumbents that aren't just squeezing every possible billable event and at the same time allow citizens at a local level to build out the infrastructure that they need how can they do that how can they do that in a pro-business sort of pro-citizen activist way it's not easy but they're doing it they're doing it and all of them are doing it differently every town is doing it in a slightly different way they're doing it with fiber they're doing it with wireless they're doing it with whatever they're building the first driveways the first acres you know and they're not putting toll tolls on sidewalks which is another wonderful metaphor I got from Bob you know because we wanted to build things out you know where everything gets charged but we wouldn't have a road system at all so the un-stated ideal is I think is that the net should be as fast as your hard drive in that respect so and the other end should be as functionally as close as your keyboard is to your screen I think that's what the net wants to be I think that's that's the end state you know not you know if I want Dan to be as close you know I right now if I can have an I am with Dan but can I exchange a pile of them very easily you know it's not that easy but that's the end state that we're all in all ends equal distance and a big zero this is zero in cost as well you know as one of the guys on that list pointed out you know as I asked this question I thought it was a useful question what is the first cost of the internet you know and if you're looking to value change we just got to be the first cost what's the first cost well the only answer I got that was useful in a way was light you're blinking light in one end of a tube and it's coming out the other end you can't even put something on it this is I see electrons it's not even all electrons flowing in here but I said it's a tube yes I said it's a tube well it can be a tube you know but the end effect is there's not that sense of place there is a sense of place but the sense of fact that I'm shoving something with mass through a conduit of some sort so this is zero there and I think that may be there is it? a little more there's a little more oh I think beyond we need to netify economics as well as law and other fields and I know Burtman came out of out of the law school and we're kind of going university wide and economics is one of those areas where I have a great deal of and very little education but I also think that there's more if we look at where the net is going and what the relationships are that are growing and how individuals and associations of individuals are contributing to the economy in a way that is not reduced to transaction when we have a new field of study of some sort or maybe something that's been visited already that I don't know about and you need to find out in any case I think the computer business is becoming a construction business I've been saying that and I got that from the open source guys who use almost nothing but construction language and talking about what they do I think it's no accident that we design and architect and build software and that we have all these new commodities that are natural building materials with completely human origins and keep improving and so I did get this from an economist Charles Crispin that was to be a cousin of mine who's the number two guy at the solicitously named Potato Institute but it's a big development organization worldwide, they're headquartered in Peru and I was talking to him about what goes on with open source and what goes on on the net and what is it that happens when we invent a wiki calp or we invent something new that everybody uses he said well it's a public good but after we talked to him I realized the notion of public goods need to be enlarged by what's happening in these areas where they're created profligately and they're cost zero to deploy so you can't necessarily make money with them you make money because of them which brings us to what I call the because effect and the because effect is how we make money because of an infrastructure rather than with infrastructure and that's what we need to figure out that's the key to helping the municipalities and the rest of us build out the net we make money because of it being there not necessarily just with it that's it, we can't make our 695 with it, we can make our 695 this could be a lot more than 695 that is it thank you