| BigHook at 20 A speech by David Isenberg 9/4/19 I founded BigHook on the premise that we could leave the best network possible to our grandchildren. I figured if anybody could crack this nut it would be people like us with a love of the Internet, with expertise in all directions, and with good will and empathy. My hypothesis was simply that we’d discuss how to do it. As a result of these discussions, some of us would grab one aspect of the problem, others of us would go deep on another area, and the sum of our actions would be greater than the parts. Nobody else I knew was taking this kind of long view of the Internet. So, I thought, it must be our job. But lately I’ve been less and less convinced that my founding premise is correct. If BigHook had been a success, after 20 years of it, surely the network we wanted to leave to our grandchildren would seem closer than it was at the beginning. But by any measure today, it seems further away. The idea that BigHook might be failing began to dawn on me around BigHook2017. I came to that BigHook with huge anxiety. I didn’t consciously know where the anxiety came from, but it interfered with my hosting duties and my moderation of the meeting. Today I understand that anxiety as my first unconscious inkling that BigHook might be failing. Last year, at BigHook2018 I tried to fight the anxiety without understanding the cause. I took Xanax. What could possibly go wrong? I checked out. Your moderator was sitting here lights-on, nobody home. If you were at BigHook2017 or 2018, I apologize. In hindsight, I realize that I was unable to lead because I didn’t know where we should go. So this year let’s look at the problem head-on. Does BigHook still have a mission? The question crystalized for me when I read Anand Giridharadas’ book Winners Take All - The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Winners Take All is about an information ecosystem. The thesis of the book is that well-intentioned people who want to make the world a better place get captured by the system that they’re trying to change. The capture process is aided and abetted by the very system that needs to change. It re-directs potential activists and leaders towards feel-good activities that nibble at the edges of the problem but don’t threaten the aspects of the system that need changing. Wanna-be do-gooders are led to believe they can improve the world by leveraging the power of capital, innovation and markets to create products and services that change the world. The power of capital, innovation and markets to create products and services that change the world. Giridharadas juxtaposes this capture process, which he calls Market World, against movements for genuine change like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and before that the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. Market World aims to “change the world” - and the implicit assumption of Market World is that “change” and “improve” are synonyms. “Change for the worse” is not in the Market World vocabulary. Giridharadas makes a case that Market World was developed by the same information architects who brought us privatization, deregulation, Reagan, Thatcher, the Tea Party and the decimation of the middle class. According to Giridharadas, Market World’s goal was to co-opt potential leaders like us who won’t buy into “greed is good” directly. It aims to neuter people with a conscience before they join movements and advocate for genuine benefits to humanity. The Market World philosophy of “doing good by doing well” is institutionalized in feel-good meetings like TED and Davos and Poptech and the Clinton Foundation summit, and the Aspen Ideas Festival. And, I might add, industry conferences like Broadband Communities Summit and Personal Democracy Forum and Freedom to Connect and BigHook. Does anybody remember Steve Talbott? He wrote NetFuture - a late-1990s must read newsletter for net-heads. He was a member of The Nature Institute, an org devoted to Goethe-ian biology, named for author-philosopher-scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethians take a holistic approach to science; I was especially impressed with Talbott’s essay on how touch and hearing are hyper-developed in blind people. I invited Talbott to BigHook2000. He didn’t come, but he sent me an explanation for his decision. The explanation said, essentially, watch out! Talbott’s gist centered on an analogy between the automobile and the Internet. Originally the automobile was seen as a huge improvement over the horse. It didn’t crap in the streets. You didn’t need to train it. It didn’t get sick or go lame. It was twice as fast. Et cetera. Fast-forward 130 years: Today motor vehicles dominate our lives whether we love them or hate them. We can’t live without them. We’d starve. We’d be jobless. We’d be friendless without cars. They determine the shape of our cities, our diets, our jobs and our free time. They usurp our public works. The oil that feeds automobiles is THE top-of-the-heap fungible commodity in today’s economy. Originally petroleum-based oil lit our cities, replacing whale oil. Then it fueled our factories and automobiles. Arguably it won World War I. By the mid-20th century it determined our foreign policy. Today it threatens the stability of our planet’s climate, the level of our oceans and the survival of civilization. Today it is a truism that “Data is the new oil.” Superficially, that means that if you mine the data, refine the data, own the data, use the data, you have power. You have control. You get what you want. Just like oil in the mid-20th century. Like oil, the power of data will have widespread consequences, some understood, some not understood. Some anticipated, some not anticipated. We’ve already seen how data influences elections. In the wrong hands will data collected on the Internet, and used to weaponize information spread by the Internet, threaten our institutions? Limit our freedom? Consolidate power? Undermine democracy? Destroy civilization? In a biological ecosystem, a shock to the environment - a flood, a drouth, insecticide, fertilizer, a hurricane, climate change, etc. - tends to disproportionately affect the smaller more vulnerable ecological niches, decrease diversity and make the entire ecosystem more monolithic. The small pieces tend to disappear, the bigger pieces become more tightly joined. I think the analogy holds to the extent that the Internet has been a Richter scale 9 shock to our information ecosystem. ——- I was hired by Bell Labs in 1985, right after the spin-out of the Baby Bells in response to the Modified Final Judgement. The ethic of Universal Service - telephony everywhere for everybody - was still in effect. We were doing the good work. We were planning the telephone network for orderly growth. We were going digital. We invented programmable switches and ISDN. We productized the speaker phone and the picture phone. We improved reliability and voice quality. We were figuring out how to sell digital services into business and residential applications. We were operating an infrastructure as important as electricity, manufacturing, water, sewage and transportation. Infrastructures need dedicated specialists to dig deep. To live their jobs. To invent improvements. We were those people. Then along came the Internet. It was qualitatively different than infrastructures like the telephone system. It was unplanned. It was organic. It was ungoverned. It was participatory. When I wanted to connect, I didn’t need to sign contracts, pay fees or schedule service technicians. I didn’t need to take a six week SONET class or spend an AT&T career learning to hack the alphabet jungle of OAM&P systems. I just called Scott Bradner and set up a modem schedule with his computer. Bingo. I was on the Internet. And, like many Bell Labs staff members, notably Steve Crandall who did one of the first Web site review newsletters, I was an early, active Internet participant-user. In distinct contrast, AT&T’s most senior management was not interested. As an active Internet user, I resonated with John Perry Barlow’s declaration that the global social space we were building was independent of the tyranny of nations. I could send packets to Japan and Europe as easily as I could send packets across town. The packets weren’t subject to customs or duties or bilateral telephone treaties. Distance was dead. Cyberspace transcended borders. Moore’s Law and Gilder’s Law were the material affirmation of Buckminster Fuller’s dictum and prophesy of More for Less. I directly experienced what Susan Crawford described - as I sat at my computer the back of the screen fell away to reveal a window on the world at all the other side of the Internet. I directly experienced what Yochai Benkler saw when he first observed the rise of non-market production, radically decentralized cooperation, and the growing irrelevance of capital. He wrote, “The declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world’s population.” The scalability of the Internet’s benefits is key. Yochai pointed out that there have always been small communities of open, shared production - the Left Bank, Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury, certain monastic communities. But the Internet made it possible for shared production to scale into the billions. This is especially important for us in this room. Dewayne often points out the benefits of being a ham radio operator, or the capabilities one gains on the Dark Net. Dewayne is a ninja, more power to him. This room is full of ninjas. But the Internet doesn’t require a black belt to get its benefits. They’re available right now to most of humanity. In the early days of the Internet, Freedom of the Press was cut loose from the affordability of presses. We could have direct discussions of the most important issues without editors or leaders or intermediaries. Anywhere there was a notable event, we could publish text and photos for the world to see. One consultant’s report declared, “Today, armed with little more than a smartphone, anyone - regardless of where they were born or how much they earn - can start a business, record a music video, crowdfund an invention, take courses with Nobel Prize-winning professors, or even launch a successful campaign for office.” The flat-rate Internet connection was replacing telephony and television. We were about to capture a trillion dollars a year from the rentiers - an Internet Dividend - was about to stay in the pockets of everyday people. We were crossing the river. Walled gardens were crumbling into irrelevance. Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, Interactive TV and the entire recording industry, telephone companies, newspapers were being replaced by blogs, Web sites and Internet video. ——- I have always been intrigued by the idea of belonging to a team or a culture. For example, the fans of the Boston Red Sox are avid believers. The Red Sox is their team. I’m curious why. Red Sox players aren’t necessarily from Boston. Surely the Boston part of the name couldn’t be enough to convey ownership. Surely the crumbling green lump called Fenway Park doesn’t inspire loyalty. What makes a Red Sox fan? What makes an American? What makes a Jew or a Christian? What would it take to make the fans of humanity root for the species Homo Sapiens? What would it take to get us all to fervently wish for a hit when we’re behind in the bottom of the 9th? What would it take to get us humans to become Team Humanity? For a brief moment, I thought the Internet might be the unifying global catalyst for Team Humanity. You might have said I was a dreamer, but I was not the only one. ——- And then the pendulum started its back swing. As the Internet moved everything interesting to the edges of the network, it also moved the need to manage its growing complexity to us users at the edge. Spam created a need to manage mail servers. I remember the sad, frustrating day in 2002 when I could no longer use the MailMerge capability of Word to push 1200 personalized copies of my email SMART Letter through my mail server because my Internet access provider was throttling it. I had to go find a specialized list server because of the danger that bulk mail might be spam. Following the same trajectory, viruses made it necessary to distrust and inspect all incoming objects. Denial of service attacks made it necessary to actively monitor and manage connections. The Internet was getting fenced in and nobody - as far as I could tell - was counting the costs to legitimate users. The idealism of, “nothing you can see that isn’t shown, nothing you can do that can’t be done,” now had an evil side. The good faith that made the Internet friendly was shattered by clueless ISPs and a few bad actors. The simplicity of “just connect” was getting hidden under layers of awkward, cumbersome, bumbling, marginally effective security. Nobody was counting the costs of the simplicity that was lost. Then access to the Internet was privatized. Portland Oregon tried to require its cable company to open its cable plant to Internet access providers. This became the Brand X decision, which we lost. In that same era, the pro-competitive provisions of the 1996 telecom act - unbundled network elements and line sharing - were overturned in court. Owned infrastructure won. The operators of Internet access networks won - despite the fact that “their” infrastructure was built on public streets and used public airwaves. We weren’t going to use “their” pipes for free. Fast-forward fifteen years. Today we’ve got three or four Internet access providers and four or five application companies that were born on the Internet and enabled by the Internet - that are too big to fail - and several governments of big countries - that know who we are, where we live, where we go, how much we make, who we talk to, who our friends are, what our politics are, what we read, what we write, what information we search for, what we buy, and what our sexual proclivities and medical problems are. The last bastion of our privacy, our face, is about to join the automated panopticon at the disposal of corporate and government power. This is quite an information ecosystem. Do we want to leave a network that enables this to our grandchildren? For reporters - who we depend on to hold our governments accountable - forget about it. Where reporters divulge government crimes, the government retaliates by searching computers, cell phones, cell phone locations, Google, Twitter and Facebook accounts, web sites accessed, emails sent and received, and anything else it can get its hands on. If you think these are tools to catch bad guys, riddle me this: who went to jail for the 2008 financial crash? For the crimes committed in the Iraq war? For the Russian hacking of the 2016 election? For every Chelsea Manning, for every Reality Winner, for every Julian Assange, for every Aaron Swartz, for every Edward Snowden, there are hundreds of rich, powerful, entitled, protected individuals walking free with access to the Internet’s levers of power who use them to enable torture, permanent war, financial plunder and the destruction of democracy. Thanks, Internet. Remember the Arab Spring? An Internet-borne wave of democracy was going to sweep across the middle east. Now there are right-wing governments from Libya and Egypt to Syria and Turkey that use Internet surveillance to round up dissidents, thwart human rights and consolidate power. Now we see mass dissent in Hong Kong and Moscow and Indonesia - will these movements be crushed by Internet-enabled surveillance, disinformation and other tools of cyberwar? I don’t know; I’m waiting for Zeynep’s report from Hong Kong, but I’m not expecting The State to lose. In other news, the Internet provides ways for bad actors, sociopaths, racists and other sickos to find each other, establish, reinforce and institutionalize degrading, dehumanizing, violent behavior. Internet researchers have shown how Youtube and Facebook algorithms cultivate - and then radicalize - a user’s attention by presenting ever more extreme content. Gamergate, the targeting, harassing, doxing and threatening of women in certain techie communities, is one example of toxic, Internet-enabled behavior. Many others lurk in the shadows, known only to their participants and victims. It is amazing to me how much Gamergate stayed below the radar of this privileged white male. Of course I noticed, but I did not give it the attention it deserved. Occasionally, like when Sarah Jeong or Brianna Wu tell their stories in the New York Times, we get a glimpse of these creepazoids. Or when a white supremecist or Incel mass murder becomes news . . . for a day. Here’s a scary thought: You don’t even need to be a sociopath to participate in the stochastic undermining of society on the Internet. For example, I ask myself, did my own voluntary heart-felt on-line expressions of skepticism about Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2016 unwittingly enable Russian election manipulation? Was I a tool? A useful idiot for expressing my opinion? I have no idea how to answer this question. But looking back, I resent that my own personal distrust of my own public expression on the Internet, makes this question even askable. Looking forward, should I be expressing my deep skepticism of a Biden presidency, or is that just the kind of info the Republicans and the Russians and the right wingers want me to spread? See, when you actually introspect about it, the weaponization of information casts its slimy doubt on independent thinking. Hey! That’s some bull boss mega-monster of an information ecosystem, this gate-keeperless, filterless, anything-goes Internet, huh? ——- OK, OK, but we need the Internet for jobs and economic growth, right? For sure the Internet has become necessary to do well in school, to apply for a job and to hold a job. It looses the bond between employee and office, which has been shown to make employees about 4% more productive and loyal. For sure, certain jobs would not even be possible without the Internet. But does the Internet really facilitate big-picture economic growth? Or is the “obvious” Internet-growth link is a just-so story, a truism without evidence? Does the Internet really create more productivity or does it merely create a new set of winners and losers? Remember book stores? Amazon may make the Gross Domestic Product a little grosser, but before Amazon, independent bookstores were informal but powerful centers of literate culture where readers met other readers and book sellers were professionals who cultivated knowledge about authors and books and ideas. Now book stores are gone along with travel agencies, photography stores and electronics stores like Radio Shack, Frys and Circuit City. The retail sector at the heart of local life has been decimated. That sector used to support a whole tier of thought workers who were active civic participants - biz owners volunteers, local government officials, civic and religious participants - with a life-long commitment to their community. Replaced by Amazon warehouse workers, Fedex drivers, Walmart cashiers. And gig-economy poverty traps formerly known as jobs. Have the Internet-creates-growth people counted these costs? More to the point of economic growth, The industrial sector in our country has been decimated. Remember fabrication plants? Assembly lines? Factories? The Internet did not single handedly destroy the industrial sector in America, but it has been a major enabler of offshoring and globalization. In similar fashion, Internet application innovation has collapsed around the four or five Internet too-big-to-failcos. They hire the best employees, acquire the most successful startups and use their size to stay at the top of their ever-expanding sectors. Sure there were monopolistic abuses before the Internet, but these companies were born on the Internet, grew big on the Internet, consolidated on the Internet and shaped the Internet to accommodate and enable them. If you have a small, independent social networking startup, or an on-line retail startup or a computer software startup or a video entertainment startup or an advertising startup, good luck on surviving as a sustainable, independent company. The Internet may not bear sole responsibility for the once-illegal monopolistic abuses Tim Wu described in his book, The Curse of Bigness, Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, but it enables them and provides the context. It is a major driver of the monopoly economy, just as surely as the telephone and the typewriter facilitated the giant companies of the 20th century. The dangers of monopoly economy are not always obvious. Nobody seems to ask - in a serious way - what does too big to fail actually mean. In 2008 the financial sector might well have destroying the economy. What if Amazon failed tomorrow? How long would it take America to rebuild the retail distribution system that Amazon replaced? Who wants to think through some scenarios here? What if Google failed? Facebook? Apple? Netflix? Microsoft? How would society recover from voids like these? Do you think these too-big-to-failcos won’t fail? The median life of a big corporation is 40 years. History is littered with the corpses of companies that defined and/or monopolized their market sector: AT&T, Sears, Wang, DEC, Kmart, Lehman Brothers, Kodak, Blockbuster, Xerox, Polaroid, JC Penny, Toys are Us, MySpace, Macys, Nokia, Atari, Blackberry, Motorola, Enron, Borders Books, Palm, Pan Am, TWA, Eastern Airlines, Circuit City, Tower Records, Compaq, AOL, Hostess, Nortel, Paine Webber, UBS, Arthur Andersen, Woolworth . . . . . . all gone due to tech changes, competition, bad management, criminal management, changing regulations, changing markets and combinations of the above. We should face the fact that Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are middle-aged companies, not immortals. They’re not planning for the void left by the competitive systems they replaced. Or for the crater left by their own eventual failures. ———- I’ve painted a bleak picture of the Internet. Scenarios always come in sets, and surely there are less extreme scenarios. The Internet still does many good things. We need it in our lives every day for some very good reasons. Furthermore, the potential for the Internet to enable amazing things - with the correct motivations, within the correct societal framework - remains immense. With 8 billion of us to feed, house, employ and inspire, we have never needed a unified Team Humanity more. With agricultural resources poised to diminish from climate change, with a tenth of us about to be displaced by rising oceans, we have never needed a unified Team Humanity more. With displacement and hunger beginning to drive mass migrations, and with migration driving the rise of xenophobia and authoritarianism, we have never needed a unified Team Humanity more. Nevertheless it is also clear that a network with the potential to unite Team Humanity across nations, races and ideologies to solve our common problems will never happen. By any measure, we are further away from the network we’d want to leave to our grandchildren than we were 20 years ago. But that’s the vision I founded BigHook to pursue. Today we are left with the reality that the Internet is, at our most optimistic, yet another infrastructure. An infrastructure that mostly serves - and only weakly occasionally threatens - the power structure. An Internet that we can’t inherently trust. An Internet that must be regulated by rules and laws, existing and new, by government bodies existing and new, and by existing and new norms, and institutions. Infrastructures need experts. Transportation systems, the electric grid, the systems of food delivery and news and education and justice - these infrastructures need experts like us who take responsibility, who question the status quo, who dream up improvements, who live their jobs. My twelve years at Bell Labs were totally engaging. If the Internet had never come along, I am certain I would have enjoyed a deeply satisfying - and certainly much longer - career husbanding the telephone network into the digital age. Many of us are doing this kind of work with the Internet. One great example is the work of Rick Whitt and Roelof Meijer and Steve Crocker and James Vasile and others who are tackling the huge issues privacy, security and decentralization at a protocol level. I’m also thinking of folks like Wendy Seltzer and Harold Feld and others who are working towards humane, sustainable norms, rules and institutions for platforms. There’s much more to do to create the sustaining technology that every infrastructure needs, and with sufficient effort and dedication it will bring slow, halting development typical of an existing infrastructure. ——- To summarize, our grandchildren are going to get the Internet. Nothing will stop it. It doesn’t need our help. But is today’s Internet the best network to leave to our grandchildren? As I’ve been saying, I don’t think so. I’m not even sure it can be improved beyond some break-even good-and-evil balance - like any other infrastructure. Twenty years ago, I would not have founded anything like BigHook to discuss the electric grid or the food delivery system. Or the telephone network. But now, having done this for 20 years, here’s where we find ourselves. Albert Szent Gyorgyi - Prof - as Prof used to say, it is exciting to fish with a big hook because the excitement of not catching a big fish is greater than the excitement of not catching a little one. The last 20 years have been a great fishing expedition. The idea of not catching the big one has been baked into BigHook from the beginning. The problem is that Team Humanity is hungry. We need that fish. The question before us is whether to keep fishing. Szent Gyorgyi also used to say“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.” WHAT has nobody has thought about the future of BigHook? Maybe its mission should be to resist handing a crappy network to our grandchildren. Maybe the method of BigHook is wrong. Maybe its off base to assume that open discussion will lead to productive action. Maybe BigHook should be an activist organization or a fund or a publication or a lobbying group or a professional society. Maybe nobody has thought up the next possible catch. Whatever BigHook becomes, I am absolutely not interested in running an elite charade aimed at distracting idealists from making real improvements. Whatever BigHook becomes, I remain astounded by the accomplishment and experience and brainpower and big-heartedness of you who carve out three days in your schedules to come to BigHook. I’m honored by your presence tonight. I know I’ve said some controversial things, and I want to hear your reactions. But I beg you, please put your personal responses in perspective. We still need to understand the future of this Internet thing we’ve created. If we aren’t able to understand it, who can? More immediately, in the next two days please, everybody, let’s try to figure out whether BigHook has a future that could actually be materially beneficial to humanity, and what the shape of that future might be. I’ll be listening carefully. |