<nettime> Rheingold on Innovation and the Amateur Spirit

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<http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue332/item7718.asp>

Innovation and the Amateur Spirit
by Howard Rheingold
Thursday, December 23, 1999

The New Interactivism : How will the Internet change politics? Howard
Rheingold explores the changing public sphere.

Pro & Con: The Underside of Moore's Law : Is there such a thing as too much
technology? Howard Rheingold considers the pitfalls of technology
acceleration.

No innovation of the 20th century stands out more than the World Wide Web.
The seeds of the collaborative spirit, and subsequent dilemma, that defines
American innovation are apparent in the creation, and subsequent
popularization, of the Web. A product of love

The Web was built for love before it was ever used to make money. Although
the Defense Department funded the forefather of the Internet, the ARPAnet,
the first online communities (which led to the mainstreaming of the Web)
emerged when ARPA programmers created the first listservs and started
communicating about their favorite science-fiction books -- strictly for
fun. Usenet has been a non-commercial, cooperative effort for 20 years.
Internet Relay Chat, Netiquette, Frequently Asked Questions, were all
created by people who wanted to enrich online culture -- with no thought to
commercial consideration. There is no denying the allure of the enormous
amounts of money that have appeared through the magic of the Web industry.
But there would not be any dot com billionaires today if amateurs had not
built the Web because it was a cool thing to do.

The original "hacker ethic," celebrated in Steven Levy's book Hackers before
the term came to mean cyber-vandalism in the popular parlance, was a norm of
cooperation. In the early 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
's Artificial Intelligence (AI) laboratory -- the mothership of more than
one revolution in computing technology -- computer programmers punched
instructions into patterns on paper tape. They left the rolls of punched
paper that represented certain software tools in an unlocked drawer for
everyone to use. Everyone in the lab could use the software encoded on the
tape, and internal intellectual competition encouraged them to figure out
better ways to do the same task, improve the software and replace the paper
tape with a new one.

To the original AI hackers, software was a common resource, a collaborative
creation of a community, not private property of any individual. Microsoft
Chairman Bill Gates' now-famous letter to the Homebrew Computer Club in the
late 1970s brought to close an era when nobody who knew how to create
personal computer software would think of trying to sell it. Outraged about
piracy of Microsoft's first product, a BASIC compiler, Gates made it clear
in the letter that software was a valuable commodity that could be owned and
should not be stolen.

>From Fidonet to fortune

Fifteen years ago, when you had to be a government researcher or have a
university connection to get an Internet account, Tom Jennings and the
Fidonet community created a distributed community of independent but
cooperative bulletin boards (BBSs). Each node was a personal computer
running a dial-up Fido BBS. Late at night, when rates were cheap, Fidonet
BBSs sent each other messages through the shortest telephone distance
possible, relaying messages from one part of the network to each other. You
cannot get much more amateur than BBS sysops. Although they were amateurs in
the sense that they created Fidonet for their own enjoyment, rather than
profit, the BBS amateurs were highly competent and inventive. They created a
poor person's Internet decades before the Net emerged into the wider
culture.

If you inquire into the backgrounds of the CEOs, managers and investors in
the early Web-based companies, you will find a large number of ex-BBSers,
who first encountered and thrived in the culture of technology
entrepreneurship when they were teenagers, running Fido BBSs out of their
bedrooms.

E-commerce has turned the Web into an engine for creating and distributing
wealth, and for creating better ways to create and distribute wealth. The
Web has become the biggest cash register in history as well as being a
self-expanding knowledge resource, global social space, and political and
scientific tool. The gold-rush analogy was tired 20 years ago, during the
first PC revolution, but the companies that have grown out of the Internet
are now worth more than all the gold ever mined. Just keep in mind that the
person who created it -- Tim Berners-Lee -- actually set out to create a
universal resource, a public good, not to make a fortune.

Mixed emotions?

Berners-Lee might not be particularly familiar to you. In his book Short
History of the Web he wrote:

"The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we
communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact
that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or
global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the
dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a
realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we
work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our
interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it,
make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we
can better work together."

That spirit embodied the early formative years of the Web -- a spirit
largely lost in the rush to profit that characterizes today's Web. The
following passage from Berners-Lee's FAQ is instructive:

Q: Is it true that you have had mixed emotions about, if I may, not cashing
in on the Web?
A: Not really. It was simply that had the technology been proprietary, and
in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to
make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can't
propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep
control of it.

Q: Are you happy with what the World Wide Web has turned out so far?

A: That is a big question. I am very happy at the incredible richness of
material on the Web, and in the diversity of ways in which it is being used.
There are many parts of the original dream which are not yet implemented.
For example, very few people have an easy, intuitive tool for putting their
thoughts into hypertext. And much of reasons for, and meaning of, links on
the Web is lost. But these can and I think will change.

Q: What do you think of the commercial turf wars going on the Web?

A: There has always been a huge competition to come out with the best Web
technology. This has followed from the fact that the standards, being open,
allow anyone to experiment with new extensions. This produces the threat of
fragmentation into many Webs, and that threat brings the companies to the
W3C [Web Accessibility Initiative] to come to agreement about how to go
forward together. It is the tension of this competition and the need for
standard which drives W3C forward at such a speed.

A symbiosis of innovation

The tension between competition and the need for a standard that drives the
rapid evolution of the Web is an intimate, dynamic and complex dance between
public and proprietary, cooperation and competition, doing it for fun and
doing it for profit. So much of our cultural conditioning responds
powerfully to the riches made by teenage entrepreneurs and the hot Internet
investment market that has spread the wealth to anyone who could afford a
piece of the action. Many people glorify "market forces," and tend to look
at the pre-gold-rush amateur era as a milieu of naive brainiacs who were not
smart enough to become jillionaire brainiacs.

What remains less visible in the rush to glorify the Internet lottery
winners are all the ways amateurs were needed to create a platform that had
never existed before -- the personal computer linked to a global network --
before professionals could build industries on that platform.

In the earliest years of Darwinian theory, the driving power of biological
competition for resources -- "survival of the fittest" -- led to an
oversimplified public understanding of the evolutionary process. Social
Darwinism, an attempt to justify class distinctions by analogy, was based on
this flawed knowledge -- and the mythology that market competition is a
force of biological generality has since grown universal. In more recent
years, as the scientific importance of symbiosis and ecological systems has
become better understood, the role of cooperation in tandem with competition
has been seen as a fundamental driving force from the intracellular level to
the level of the planetary ecosystem. If the past history of computing and
networking are good predictors, both cooperation and competition will be
essential driving forces in the future of technological evolution.

Howard Rheingold is the author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier. His e-mail address is hlr@well.com.

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