Who Owns the Future? (33 page)

Forget the usual dilemma that divides people. On the one side are intellectual property advocates who struggle to shut down share sites. On the other are the Pirate Parties, wiki enthusiasts, Linux types, and so on. The contest between the two sides sparks endless debates, but they’re both inadequate and inferior to the original idea for digital media.

Ted forged a path through the horns of the usual dilemma, even though the path predates the sprouting of the horns. Anyone in a Nelsonian system can reuse material to make playlists, mash-ups, or other new structures, with even
more
fluidity than in today’s “open” system, where the all-or-nothing, ad hoc system of intellectual property intervenes unpredictably. At the same time, people are paid, and information isn’t made free, but is affordable. A Nelsonian solution provides a simple, predictable way to share without limit or hassle over digital networks, and yet doesn’t destroy middle classes in the long term.

This is the half-century-old idea on which I build.

Two-Way Links

A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network and what we have become familiar with online is that Ted’s network links were two-way instead of one-way. In a network with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are linked to it.

That would mean you’d know all the websites that point to yours. It would mean you’d know all the financiers who had leveraged your mortgage. It would mean you’d know all the videos that used your music.

Two-way linking would preserve context. It’s a small, simple change in how online information should be stored that couldn’t have vaster implications for culture and the economy.

Two-way links are a bit of a technical hassle. You have to keep them up to date. If someone else stops linking to you, you have to make sure you don’t maintain an out-of-date indication that they still are linked. That hassle means there is some initial difficulty in getting a two-way system going as compared to a one-way system. This is part of why HTML spread so fast.

But it is one of those cases where getting something easy up front just makes the price worse later on. If everything on the Web were two-way linked, it would be an easy matter to sort out which nodes were the most important for a given topic. You’d just see where most of the links led. Since that information wasn’t present, Google was needed to scrape the
entire
Web all the time to recalculate all the links that should have existed anyway, keep them in a dungeon, and present the results in order to lure so-called advertisers.

Similarly, if two-way links had existed, you’d immediately be able to see who was linking to your website or online creations. It wouldn’t be a mystery. You’d meet people who shared your interests as a matter of course. A business would naturally become acquainted with potential customers. “Social networks” like Facebook were brought into existence in part to recapture those kinds of connections that were jettisoned when they need not have been, when the Web was born.

Why Isn’t Ted Better Known?

Xanadu wasn’t merely a technical project; it was a social experiment of its time.

The most hip thing in the Bay Area from the 1960s to sometime in the 1980s was to form a commune or even a cult. I remember one, for instance, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where hippie culture hatched, that fashioned itself the “Free Print Shop.” They’d print lovely posters for “movement” events in the spectral, inebriated, neo-Victorian visual style of the time. (How bizarre it was to hear someone recommended as being “part of the movement.” This honorary title meant nothing beyond aesthetic sympathy, but there was infantile gravity in the intonation of the word
movement,
as though our conspiracies were consequential. They never were, except when computers were involved, in which case they were more consequential than almost any others in history.)

The Free Print Shop made money doing odd jobs, included women, and enacted a formal process for members to request sex with one another through intermediaries. This was the sort of thing that seemed the way of the future, and that beckoned to computer nerds. An algorithm leading reliably to sex! I remember how reverently dignitaries from the Free Print Shop were welcomed at a meeting of the Homebrew Club, where computer hobbyists shared their creations.

I recall all this only to provide the context. Ted had a band of followers/collaborators. It would have been uncool to be specific about exactly what they were. They sometimes lived in a house here or there, or vagabonded about. They broke up and reconciled repeatedly, and were perpetually on the verge of presenting the ultimate software project, Xanadu, in some formulation, which would have been remembered as the first implementation of the Web, or perhaps even the Internet itself.

To be clear, the key technical insight that allowed networking to become decentralized and scale was packet switching, and that insight did not arise from Ted Nelson or the Xanadu project. Instead it arose just a little later than Ted’s earliest work, from the
very different world of elite universities, government labs, and military research funding. However, at least the functionality of something like packet switching is foreseen in Ted’s early thinking.

Ted published outrageous books. One was a big floppy book composed of montages of nearly indecipherable small print snippets flung in all directions, called
Computer Lib/Dream Machines
. If you turned it one way and started reading, it was what Che would have been reading in the jungle if he had been a computer nerd. Flip it upside down and around and you had a hippie wow book with visions of crazy psychedelic computation. Ted often said that if this book had been published in a font large enough to read, he would have been one of the most famous figures of the computer age, and I agree with him.

The main reason for Ted’s obscurity, however, is that Ted was just too far ahead of his time. Even the most advanced computer science labs were not in a position to express the full radical quality of change that digital technology would bring.

For instance, I first visited Xerox PARC when some of the original luminaries were still gathered there. I remember muttering about how weird it was that PARC machines supported the virtual copying of documents. After all, the same research lab had pioneered ways to connect computers together. For God’s sake, I would say, this is the place that invented Ethernet not long before. We all know it’s stupid to copy documents when you have a network. The original is still
right there
!

A stern look would greet me. I would be taken aside. “Look, we know that and you know that, but consider our sponsor. All this work is funded by Xerox, the preeminent
copying machine
company.”

Indeed, in those days, Xerox was so associated with copying that it had to worry about whether its trademark would go generic. Visitors to PARC were reminded never to say “Xerox machine.”

The admonitions would continue: “No one can tell the Xerox execs that innovations from this lab could make the very
idea
of copies, even in the abstract, obsolete. They’ll freak out.”

The early computers built at PARC looked remarkably like modern PCs and Macs, and the concept prototypes and sketches foresaw modern phones and tablets. Xerox became notorious for
having funded the lab that defined the core of the modern feeling of computation, and yet famously failed to capitalize on it.

Much later, when Tim Berners-Lee’s design for HTML first appeared, computer scientists who were familiar with the field Ted had pioneered—hypertext and networked media—offered the reaction you’d expect: “Wait, it only has one-way linking. That’s not adequate. It’s throwing away all the best information about network structure.”

HTML appeared at a tired moment for Silicon Valley. The way I remember it, there was a trace of panic right in the early 1990s about whether anyone would come up with new “killer apps” for personal computers. Would there ever be another idea like the spreadsheet? HTML was so easy to spread. Each node had no accountability, so nodes could accumulate in a “friction-free” way, even though there is no such thing as a free lunch, and the friction would surely appear later on in some fashion. We were all impatient and bored and leapt at the thrill of quick adoption.

Ted was the source point for much of what we hold familiar today. For instance, he called the new medium “hypertext.” Ted was very fond of
cyber-,
which originally related to navigation, and which Norbert Wiener adopted into
cybernetics
because navigation was a great example of the core process of feedback in an information system. But Ted’s preferred prefix was
hyper-,
which, he once told me, when I must have still been a teenager, also captured something of the frenetic edge that digital obsessions seem to bring into human character. So Ted coined terms like
hypermedia
and
hypertext
.

Much later, in the early 1990s, the Web would be born when Tim Berners-Lee proposed HTML, the foundational protocol for Web pages. The letters
ML
stand for “markup language,” but the
HT
stands for Ted’s coinage,
hypertext
.

Ted is the only person alive who invented a new humor to add to my scheme of humors.
*
Ted’s humor suggests an unlimited, but still human-centered future based on improving technologies.

*
Positive, optimistic, but solidly humanistic science fiction, such as
Star Trek,
fits into this humor, but so far as I can tell, Ted’s early work predates the genre.

PART EIGHT

The Dirty Pictures (or, Nuts and Bolts: What a Humanistic Alternative Might Be Like)

CHAPTER 19

The Project

You Can’t Tweet This

Enough has been said about the problem. The time has come to pitch a solution.

The “elevator pitch” is a common phrase in Silicon Valley, even though few buildings have enough floors to require actual elevator rides. You are supposed to be able to pitch a startup quickly enough that a highly distracted person can get your idea before the next incoming tweet spurs the smartphone to buzz.

It wouldn’t be credible for me to compress a pitch for a whole new digital economy design into such a tiny packet. There must be sufficient detail for it to at least be meaty enough to criticize. And yet, my pitch would become ridiculous if I tried to specify such a huge new thing in detail in advance.

My best guess on the right level of detail is what I’ll call a space elevator pitch. A space elevator is a hypothetical technology that might make it easy to get into space. A very strong cable would be hung from a satellite to a tether in the ground, and you’d just climb up it. So far, we don’t know how to make a strong enough cable, and that’s only the start of the problems. But in principle, the idea might work someday.

This proposal is like that. I don’t pretend for a moment that all the problems implicit in it are already known, much less solved. And yet it might work, and the benefits would be huge, just like a cheap way to get into space.
*

*
As it happens, I am working on an alternative to space elevators, which is a gigantic lighter-than-air railgun to launch spacecraft.

A Less Ambitious Approach to Be Discouraged

One can imagine the gears turning inside the minds of policy wonks.

“This notion of Lanier’s is ambitious. The transition would be politically difficult. But he does have a point about how value is being driven off the books in order to concentrate wealth in a way that shrinks the economy as it becomes more about information. Maybe there’s an easier way to address the problem he’s attempting to solve. Wouldn’t it be easier just to treat the information space as a public resource and tax or charge companies somehow for the benefit of using it?”

We do have rules in place to charge commercial concerns for using the public airwaves. Maybe that model could be extended to information flows in general. The argument would be that every citizen contributes to the information space whether they want to or not. Everyone is measured and tracked in the network age. So why not have government collect compensation for the use of that value in order to fund social welfare?

In that case it would cost real money to use the resources needed to start an occult Wall Street scheme or to dangle “free” Internet bait in the hopes of trapping a population into paying for visibility. The benefit of a general “spy data tax” would be a lessening of “scammy” entrepreneurship and a corresponding increase in the funding of genuinely productive new ventures. Meanwhile, as more and more jobs are lost to automation, social welfare funds would burst with new revenues to cope with the deluge.

In the current American climate, what I just said would be called “fighting words.” Most Americans would probably fear that such a policy would promote unlimited growth of government bureaucracy, and that would ultimately lead to a loss of both liberty and innovation. The argument against the idea would generally go as follows: Since everything is becoming more and more software-mediated, a spy data tax would not lead to a bureaucracy of a fixed size, like the ones that deal with the public airwaves. Instead, there would be ever more kinds of spy data, more and more revenues collected for that information, and eventually a giant central planning
agency that collects money from absolutely every aspect of activity and then doles it out. This would be the ultimate magnet for corruption. A colossal bureaucracy would take on all the worst characteristics of Siren Servers but in a more monolithic way.