Here are a few specific starting points, then I’ll get to my main point, which is that we (a technologically-oriented US, at least) are not well set up for the future in terms of how we evolve tech policy. Not a new thought, but I think the SOPA situation may be putting us in a worse spot.

But first 3 starting points and a personal observation:

1. SOPA+PIPA are awful bills. No way around it. They over-reach, they circumscribe civil liberties, and they mostly will not work. They shouldn’t pass, and we should do whatever we can to keep that from happening. They’re the latest in a long line of legislation that looks like this: reducing freedoms in a misguided attempt to protect us from a different big bad. They’re so numerous in US history they hardly need listing here.

2. Existing industries are always oriented towards self-preservation. No exception here. But there’s a funny thing that happens: the most progressive companies of today who become successful and dominant will become reactionary in the future, oriented themselves towards self-preservation. Same as it ever was. And you can see it even in the current situation — the companies who are most outspoken are the modern Internet companies: LinkedIn, Mozilla, Zynga, Google, etc etc. Mostly on the sidelines are the most progressive technology companies of the past decades, even including Apple. So this is not, fundamentally, a techie v content type of issue at all, but more of a progressive v conservative technology issue.

3. We do have existing laws and norms. A number of folks argued that content owners just need to accept that pirated goods are a viable alternative and need to learn how to compete with them. I’m wholly unpersuaded by that point of view. Or, rather, I believe we do have existing laws that govern how we behave. It’s pretty clear (to me at least) that content businesses will need to evolve, and many interesting ones already have. But that’s something for a lawful market to decide, not for anyone to thrust onto content owners & creators.

And then a personal observation: I was actually a little nervous writing about SOPA last week because of the tone of the conversation to date. I felt like it might actually provoke harsh negative reaction and somehow brand me as “SOPA-friendly” or against the web. That’s a weird thing for me to feel, as I think my web & open culture bona fides are pretty well established at this point between my work with Mozilla, PCF, Code for America, and now Tumblr, etc etc. That by itself tells me that there’s something wrong about how things are going.

Okay, so given all that as a context, here’s my main point: no matter what outcome we get to with respect to SOPA+PIPA, we’re in a bad spot going forward. 

I think much of the legitimate frustration on the Silicon Valley side of the fence is that there seems to be no way to have a meaningful conversation about this stuff in ways that we know to be productive. It’s happening at this point with some guy who doesn’t seem to understand technology having his staff & a bunch of lobbyists prepare a non-sensical bill and then try to jam it through Congress, without any real effort to understand what might actually work. (And, worse, it’s being done in a way that seems deliberately designed to misinform.) So it’s a bunch of backroom, captured discussion that has massive impact on how we live our lives — and it’s all completely opaque (at best).

The real thing that I’m worrying more and more about is not SOPA per se, although that’s a very large problem itself. The real problem that I see is that our government just isn’t set up to make meaningful technology policy decisions going forward. I think Larry Lessig would argue that that’s now true about all facets of modern life, but I think that with technology it’s significantly worse. We have massive interconnectedness of systems built on an extremely rapidly changing foundation of technology. But more than that, technology is now transforming our private and public lives so quickly that we can hardly make sense of any of it at a personal level, let alone a public policy level. And there seems to be no way for legislation to keep pace unless we change the discussion there from specific technologies instead to principles of how we want to build and evolve our society.

And I just don’t see how that kind of conversation can happen right now.

I see how to defeat SOPA, more or less. But it’s more lobbying, more rhetoric, more Capitol Hill influence. And I think that all of that stuff ultimately corrupts industries that use it. I know this is not a new objection, and I’m sure that there have been people in every industry forever who have made this point.

So I think most of what I wanted to write on Friday is this: I desperately hope we can (1) defeat SOPA and more importantly (2) figure out a way to have useful technology policy discussions that can inform both our legistatures and law enforcement agencies. This isn’t the last law that will be technically poor and will impinge on civil liberties. There will be more, and they’ll come up more and more frequently as increasing portions of our society get disoriented by and disrupted by new technology.

We shouldn’t rely on symmetric (and corrupting) lobbying efforts to make things better; we’ll just get more of the same crummy situation we’ve got.

What I think we really need to figure out is how to help our leadership in government act and think in a more agile way, informed by more of our citizenry. More like the web, in a lot of ways. (Ed Lee’s announcement of an SF partnership with Code for America is a start.)

Maybe impossible, a pipe dream. But that’s the target I think we should be setting for ourselves, not just defeating a crappy, misinformed bill.

1. it’s not a discussion at all — it’s people calling each other names.
2. it’s highly likely to have a result that is unhelpful at best, and insanely destructive at worst
3. we’re building a completely worthless/bad roadmap for how to deal with technology policy going forward, and it’s going to get worse

Let me be very clear: SOPA is a terrible law that should not be enacted under any circumstances. It’s broken technically and misguided from a policy point of view. It not only won’t accomplish what advocates want it to accomplish, but it also will create backbreaking burdens and barriers to entry for some of our most promising technology companies and cultural movements of the coming decade.

But also: content creators & owners have a legitimate beef with how their content can be appropriated and distributed so easily by rogue actors.

Here’s the conversation we should be having: content & technology should be very aligned. Hollywood and Silicon Valley (broadly speaking — I’m talking metaphorically here) both want the same things ultimately: easier and bigger ways to share and enjoy awesome content from all sources, in a way that’s economic for everyone involved.

What we should be talking about is how to get better alignment, how to build systems and content that is better for, you know, actual human beings to use and enjoy.

But that isn’t the conversation that’s happening (and I use the term “conversation” here very loosely, since it has characteristics more like a bunch of schoolyard name calling). The conversation that’s happening is going more like this:

- content: “you people are stealing our stuff. you’re thieves”

- techies: “we’re not stealing it. we’re just building great apps for users.”

- content: “you’re ignoring the problem and helping the thieves. you’re effectively pirates, so we’re going to shut everyone down.”

- techies: “you’re acting like jackbooted fascists, embracing censorship and your’e going to end everything that’s good about culture today.”

- content: “we’re trying to protect our content — you guys are pretending like there’s no problem, then getting rich off platforms that pillage our content.”

- techies: “you don’t understand how the Internet works — how do you even live life in the 21st century? dinosaurs.”

So that’s awesome. Then you throw Congress into the mix and hilarity ensues. Because if you’re looking for folks who really do not act like they want to understand the Internet, Capitol Hill is a pretty good place to start. And then this is all devolving into a fight of pirates versus creators. Of protectors-of-democracy versus fascists. Or whatever.

What we need to be talking about is where the actual infringement problem is happening (I’ve heard from folks that the vast majority of the problem is on the order of a few dozen syndicates overseas). And how we need to be thinking about copyright law — in an age where copies are the natural order of things, as opposed to previously, when it was harder to make copies. And what sorts of law enforcement resources we need to bring to bear to shut down the activity of these real malicious actors overseas. (At root, I’m persuaded that the current issues are really law enforcement issues – we need to figure out how to enforce the laws that are already on the books to protect IP, not create new ones.)

Acting like there’s no problem isn’t the answer — there is a legitimate IP issue here. But pressuring a behind-the-times and contributions-captive legislative body to enact overly intrusive and abusable laws is even worse, both economically and civically.

What’s extremely discouraging to me right now is that I don’t really see how we can have a nuanced, technically-informed, respectful discussion/debate/conversation/working relationship. I’m not convinced that Congress is at all the right body to be taking up these issues, and am 100% convinced that they don’t currently have the technical wherewithal to make informed decisions, in any event.

So what we’re left with is one group pushing their captive legislators for new, over-reaching laws and calling technologists names. And a group reacting to that by calling names back.

I think the best that we can hope for in this scenario is that the current bill will grind to a halt and nothing will change. But I think that can’t be where we aim for the future.

Because technology policy issues are going to come up again and again and again as time goes on. (Next up, undoubtedly, is another round of privacy legislation, and I would predict the name calling will be even more intense and even less productive.)

We’re mediating more of our lives than ever through new technologies that we barely understand as technologists, let alone consumers or civic leaders. We need to figure out ways to have meaningful discussions, to try out policies that may or may not work at first and iterate quickly on them, like we do with products themselves.

I don’t have any answers here, but wanted to write down what’s been bugging me, as I think we all need to think more about what we want our lives to look like in the future.

A biography of Marshall McLuhan, one of the smartest media thinkers ever, written by Douglas Coupland, one of my very favorite authors, was going to be pretty much a no brainer for me to pick up and read and enjoy. And I really did, although I think this book probably is only for a particular type of nerd. (Pretty sure you know who you are.)

As you’d expect from Coupland & the subject, the style of the book is sort of meta. Bits & pieces about McLuhan, mixed up with other bits and pieces. I didn’t love the style, but I did find a bunch of the book thoughtful & provocative. And it really is amazing how clearly McLuhan could see the future — I think he & Neil Postman figured out decades ago things we’re only just now figuring out together as we all converge online.

Here’s what Coupland had to say to start the book:

Life becomes that strange experience in which you’re zooming along a freeway and suddenly realize that you haven’t paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you’re still alive and didn’t crash. The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be “you.” Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing. And this is why Marshall McLuhan is important, more so now than ever, because he saw this coming a long way off, and he saw the reasons for it. Those reasons were so new and so offbeat and came from such a wide array of sources that the man was ridiculed as a fraud or a clown or a hoax. But now that we’ve damaged time and our inner voices, we have to look at McLuhan and see what else he was saying, and maybe we’ll find out what’s coming next, because the one thing we can all agree on is that the future has never happened so quickly to so many people in such an extreme way, and we really need a voice to guide us. Marshall identified the illness and worked toward finding ways of dealing with it.

Amazing. But here’s the really odd bit:

And one must remember that Marshall arrived at these conclusions not by hanging around, say, NASA or IBM, but rather by studying arcane sixteenth-century Reformation pamphleteers, the writings of James Joyce, and Renaissance perspective drawings. He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years.

And any book like this would be incomplete without a little Canuckiana, so here’s a quote from McLuhan: “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.” Interestingly, I think that while that would be considered pejorative to most in the US, I don’t think that’s how he meant it.

One very strange fact that floored me: McLuhan’s brain was supplied with blood through not one but two arteries at the base of his skull. In case you’re not up to date on your human physiology, that’s not normal. Sometimes happens in cats. Very rarely in humans. But you have to think that it had a real effect on how he thought and lived (and probably how he died ultimately, since he had many small strokes and blackouts throughout his lifetime).

Anyway, fascinating.

And one last thought to leave you with by McLuhan himself: “Our ‘Age of Anxiety’ is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools– with yesterday’s concepts.”

I think we live in a complex, rapidly evolving, unfamiliar time now — so much — technology, mainly — feels like it’s changing so quickly that it’s hard to integrate all the changes in our lives, let alone to really understand them and their impact. It’s comforting to know that at least a few people felt the same way nearly 50 years ago.

What’s special about their products today is how simple they are to operate: you can get on the phone and do a product demo or share slides in under a minute. It’s trivially easy to send information around to customers and be able to understand what they viewed themselves or forwarded along. And it closes the loop by allowing easy sharing of all materials and insight with your coworkers.

And it all works in a web browser, with just a URL. No special installs, no plug-ins needed. I’m not talking about just modern browsers, either: any browser, even including IE6. (I’ll wait for your gasps of amazement to die down on that one. Also, it’s the last time I’ll ever mention IE6 on my blog. )

They’ve really thought hard about how to build great tools for sales and marketing people, and it shows.

It was a very quick decision for us — at Greylock, we talk a lot about “our kind of founders” — and Al and Jim are definitely that. Here’s what I mean.

We’ve known Al for some time — he was the founding CTO of Evite — it’s a little hard to remember, at this distance, what a revelation that product was, but it changed everything — it let us interact with each other and collaborate in ways that had just been way too painful previously. And it’s influenced too many startups to count since then.

Well, he and Jim came in to give a presentation to us about they’d done, they jumped right into how their customers love it, how sales are rocketing up, what’s next — and slowly it dawned on me that they were using their own service to present! So I opened up my laptop to type in the URL & access code and bam!, I could see their slides — took maybe 3 seconds. I got sort of excited so pulled out my iPhone, then my iPad — everything just worked. And to Al & Jim’s credit, none of my futzing around with various electronics fazed them one bit. They just kept moving, unsurprised that there were no glitches in what they’d built.

And that’s part of what we mean when we say “our kind of founders” — they’re strong product and operating founders, who after changing the world once with Evite, just put their heads down and did the hard work of building something from scratch these past two years. No hype, no fanfare, just customers that love their products and working with them.

So we’re very excited to get involved in the next phase of their growth, and couldn’t be happier to be leading their funding round. Take a look.

We knew Tumblr was big when we started talking with David and John over the summer — over the last year or so, it’s practically exploded onto the scene — it seems like every piece of interesting content and expression you see today has been posted on someone’s Tumblr. The numbers back that up — last month the 30 million blogs on Tumblr generated 13 billion page views.

As we got to know the team there more, it became a more and more obvious decision for us to get involved. We love entrepreneurs who are product visionaries, who have a strong point of view and who want to build great products that affect hundreds of millions of users. David is clearly one of those — a founder with deep character and a desire to build a meaningful, enduring set of products and a company that users love.

What we didn’t know when we started, but learned as we went is that in addition to the ubiquity of Tumblr today, the engagement of users and posters and rebloggers is absolutely off the charts. Good content gets surfaced and spread incredibly rapidly — more quickly than any other network I’ve ever encountered. Lots of reasons for this incredible engagement — the team at Tumblr has done a wonderful job of figuring out some fundamental and novel avenues for self-expression. I’ve found so many interesting posts and perspectives on Tumblr that I never would have found without it — and it’s clear that that’s been the experience for millions of other users.

At Greylock, we’re always looking for the breakout companies — because we’ve each been involved in building and growing some of the companies with the broadest reach in history (Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Mozilla, and more), we have a huge respect for founders and teams that have gotten to real scale like Tumblr has.

So Greylock and I are thrilled to be involved with Tumblr now, and we’re excited to help the company take the next steps forward into becoming an even more powerful platform for self-expression and discovery.

And you can find my own Tumblr at lilly.tumblr.com.

I really liked this look at Google by Steven Levy — I’ve always liked his insights about the company — he’s had extraordinary access, and I loved the stories about when Google was less gigantic & earth-encompassing. Was fun to read about the exploits of an awesome group of people just out and about and trying things.

Google’s obviously going through periods of intense change now, and I think that a few years from now this book will feel like it describes a completely different company — and, really, it maybe already does.

But it was fun to read about so many of my friends and colleagues and what they went through, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone in the industry.

But more and more, that’s not the way I’m thinking about my own systems; as devices proliferate at my own home, and as I tend to use tiny connected computers in more numerous and varied contexts.

I’ve been interested in what I call “4 screen & a cloud” products for a while: products that help us unify and take advantage of our laptop + phone + tablet + tv — but it all became a little clearer to me a few weeks when a wave of devices entered the house all at the same time. In the space of a few weeks, I upgraded to an iPad2, got a Samsung Tab to experiment with Android Tablets, got an Android phone in addition to my iPhone, and got a WebOS phone from the D9 conference. So we had all those devices in the house, plus our iMac, Kathy’s set of devices, and my mom’s as well, since she was visiting. Oh, and 3 Kindles between the three of us. Screens were everywhere.

Now, I’m the first to recognize that we’re somewhat atypical in our technology consumption in normal times; add to that the devices that I’ve picked up lately because of work and my house is a jumble of operating systems, devices and power adapters. Exciting!

When you get that many screens and devices, what happens is interesting: when you want to do something, communicate with someone, remember something, schedule an appointment, read a book, or whatever, you just pick up whatever screen is nearest to you and work from that.

Well, you do that if you can. Because in our current platform chaos, not all devices are fungible, not all activities are available from all platforms.

So that got me thinking some about what I need, and where, and in what contexts and on what devices, and now I think about platforms this way: I have a set of screens, a set of stuff, and a set of people that I want to do things with — and I want those sets available to me wherever & whenever I am.

By screens, I mean something more than just pixels: I really mean input & output systems, of which screens are the most visible parts; really it should probably be screens, sensors & speakers. In other words, it’s the displays of each system, the audio systems, and the ways that we indicate intent, be it typing, swiping, speaking, remote-button-puching, smiling, waving, running, or just being.

By storage, I mean something more than just bits: while Dropbox and iCloud and Clouddrive are important, I want to do more than just store and share my files with others. It’s about more than having a place to put my music. It’s about having the context of my life: my apps, my reading material, my history of shopping & interest intent. It’s really the things I’m creating, consuming, sharing, saving, working on and just thinking about. One of the things that’s probably non-obvious about this formulation is that for this to work, the storage is going to be pretty keyed to my identity. Without knowing something about who I am, it won’t work.

And by network, I mean something more than just my Facebook graph: what’s becoming clear is that we’ve all got many and diverse groupings in our lives, ranging from the very intimate groups of a nuclear family to the wide-ranging groupings of Twitter followers. The short version, though, is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that, just like in the offline world, people online want to do things with each other. Shocking, I know.

That’s the definition of platform that’s relevant to me: a combination of screens, storage and networks that help me do my work and live my life. The companies that see that true platforms transcend any one particular technology stack will be the ones that prosper — you can already see some interesting ones emerge.

As a side note, I think screens, storage & networks is one way to look at the landscape of the giants competing: it’s where Apple, Google, Facebook & Amazon are slugging it out (and to some extent it’s the evolution now of my old stomping ground, Mozilla). I would argue that each of the giants has a super strong position in 1 or 2 of the three areas, but none has a lock on all three, and most of the interesting initiatives of each are about strengthening the places where they’re historically weak.

Apple is obviously terrific at screens, okay at storage, and not very good at networks.

Google’s now strong at screens (although probably not as strong as Apple) and could be great at storage, and finally has a credible start on networks.

Facebook is incredibly strong at networks, has some weakness in screens, and is pretty good with storage (at least for things like photos).

And Amazon is very strong on storage, weak at networks, and weak (at the moment) on screens.

I’d argue that their relative strengths and weaknesses are  important for startups to understand as well, as that gives you a bit of a map of one set of opportunities.

Anyway, that’s how I’m thinking about things lately. What do you think?

Off the top, let me say this: I really love Twitter. A lot. I use it every day — I don’t always post things (although most times I do), but I always read and discover new things — it’s become integral to me in a bunch of ways. I share interesting articles about technology and startups and politics and literature that I find. I link to my blog posts like this one. I ask questions, mostly about travel and technology. I vent about things (I’m looking at you @unitedairlines). I talk about TV and music that I like. I track a bunch of my friends and coworkers and how they’re doing. And I make a lot of dumb jokes.

What’s clear at this point is that I’m not a particularly typical Twitter user. As services evolve, they find their main use cases, their reasons for existing. You’ve got Facebook for interacting with friends in symmetric ways; you’ve got Quora for getting high quality answers to questions; you’ve got Tumblr for expressing a synthesis of media that in aggregate represents you.

Twitter has evolved, I think, into essentially a celebrity broadcast medium. Now, I’m using the term ‘celebrity’ a little broadly — there are the Biebers and Gagas, of course, but there are also the CNNs and NPRs of news, and the Saccas of the tech world, and the long middle part of the curve of bands and critics and pundits that have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. It seems obvious to me at this point that this is really what Twitter is for: tracking our mega and mini broadcasters, being able to follow along in real time to see what they’re doing, writing and what they’re amplifying from others.

That’s part of how I use it, but I think that my use case is somewhat more complicated, which makes my tweets pretty atypical. My tweet stream is more like a mix of broadcasting, retweets, active conversations with friends, debates with other techies, and a bunch of snarky jokes.

I think there are a few reasons for this.

First, because I’m more of a “Twitter native” — that is, someone who’s been active on the system since the first million users, I’ve been part of the ‘figuring out’ conversations that have happened, mostly as a user. So I’ve gone through several generations of the product before it landed on celebrity broadcast as the center, and some of those generations of use case have really stuck with me.

Second, I developed a bunch of my patterns while I worked at Mozilla, a uniquely open organization where Twitter really fit. Because we don’t have a ton of internal systems for closed communications by design, we like to have conversations in the open, on public wikis, on open IRC channels, and on Twitter. And because I had management responsibility of a distributed, global organization, it helped me to kind of keep track of folks I wasn’t able to see every day. Beyond that, it let me have some interactions in a public way with people that I could model so that others would see them and (maybe) learn from them. In a lot of ways, I think of it as the modern equivalent of Managing by Walking Around, popularized by Hewlett-Packard long ago. It’s easy to brush off this use case as not real, but I really did use it a lot for helping to manage at Mozilla.

And while Mozilla is obviously unique in its openness, in a lot of ways the Silicon Valley ecosystem shares some of the characteristics, with lots of actors who are decentralized and distributed, working in different ways but able to share public communication channels like this.

The third reason I’m quirky in my use, I think, is that I make so many jokes on it. I’ve always been a guy that’s most comfortable at the back of the classroom making jokes. It’s not necessarily the part of my personality I’m most proud of, but it’s what I do. I’m happiest in the back, scribbling semi-related ideas to what’s going on, making jokes to myself or friends. Twitter gives me a pretty good way to do that sort of thing without being disruptive, and it’s fun for me.

I guess last is the fact that a lot of close friends also spend a fair amount of time on it, so keeping up with them and interacting with them there is fun and rewarding.

As I’ve moved up to 50k followers and past, I think it’s going to start changing how I use it a bit, for better or worse. It’s becoming somewhat more of a broadcast/audience thing and less of a group-of-friends thing. It remains extremely useful and integral to me, but probably will be so in different ways.

Anyway, enough for now — just thought I’d capture a few thoughts here that wouldn’t fit in 140 characters.

I’ve always found Professor Turkle, from MIT, to be both thoughtful and thought-provoking — she’s spent her career observing and learning about and thinking about how we interact with technology, and how that interaction shapes us as a society. It’s interesting stuff that I wish more people paid more attention to, so I was happy to read this book about how a couple of types of technology are changing us.

The first part of the book I was a little ambivalent about; it focuses on how we interact with what I’ll call robots: physical machines in our environment, more or less humanoid. Lots of good experiment-based reflection on how we interact with objects, and I think significantly deeper and more nuanced than, say, Cliff Nass’ work a decade or so that he wrote about in The Media Equation. (Admittedly, we’re a lot further down the road now than when Nass wrote that, but even when it had just come out, I found it to be an extremely superficial analysis.)

The second half of the book is what I really wanted to get into: how are we changing the way we relate to other actual human beings as we moderate more and more interactions through electronic media. In lay terms: how are digital social networks affecting the way we communicate, experience, and live our lives, both with those who are physically with us and those who aren’t.

I thought Turkle did a good job with a bunch of this topic, with one proviso: the technology and products we use are now evolving so quickly that it seems to me that any clinical, experimental understanding of what’s going on is going to necessarily be years out of date, even for highly motivated, diligent, and speedy researchers.

I think there weren’t a ton of clear conclusions in the book, but much that we should all think about more deeply, so I’ll leave you with a few of Professor Turkle’s passages. If you care about understanding what’s changing and why in our communications and interpersonal interactions, you should read this book. A few quotes:

“Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.”

“The media has tended to portray today’s young adults as a generation that no longer cares about privacy. I have found something else, something equally disquieting. High school and college students don’t really understand the rules. Are they being watched? Who is watching? Do you have to do something to provoke surveillance, or is it routine? Is surveillance legal? They don’t really understand the terms of for Facebook or Gmail, the mail service that Google provides. They don’t know what protections they are “entitled” to. They don’t know what objections are reasonable or possible. If someone impersonates you by getting access to your cell phone, should that behavior be treated as illegal or as a prank? In teenagers’ experience, their elders—the generation that gave them this technology—don’t have ready answers to such questions.”

“The networked culture is very young. Attendants at its birth, we threw ourselves into its adventure. This is human. But these days, our problems with the Net are becoming too distracting to ignore. At the extreme, we are so enmeshed in our connections that we neglect each other. We don’t need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place. The generation that has grown up with the Net is in a good position to do this, but these young people need help. So as they begin to fight for their right to privacy, we must be their partners. We know how easily information can be politically abused; we have the perspective of history. We have, perhaps, not shared enough about that history with our children. And as we, ourselves enchanted, turned away from them to lose ourselves in our e-mail, we did not sufficiently teach the importance of empathy and attention to what is real.”

Great stuff. Read it.

Yesterday we were invited to the House of Commons here in London, and after a short speech by the Speaker of the House of Commons, 5 of us participated in a panel on the impact of digital technology on the future of democracies. About 100 people attended, including several MPs and members of the House of Lords, plus people involved in running the government and figuring out what to do with technology.

It was moderated by Jon Drori (fantastic job, and fantastic guy), and the Silicon Valley folks who participated were: Reid Hoffman, Megan Smith, Joi Ito, Nancy Lublin and myself. Each of the 5 of us started by giving a 5 minute ‘provocation’ to consider, then we ran it as a more traditional panel.

I’ll write more soon; for now, my provocation follows. Would love to hear what you think.

—

As I started preparing my remarks, I knew that I wanted to talk, in the main, about how technology can make our democracies better. But here, in the heart of British government, it’s impossible for me not to think about a couple of British authors and imaginers of future dystopias: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

With these 2 especially, it seems a particular talent of the British to imagine horrible dysfunctional futures. Orwell in his 1984, of course, with nightmares of totalitarian control and surveillance, and oppressive government imposed on unwilling citizens. Huxley, by contrast, in Brave New World, painted a completely different picture: a citizenry of sheep happily gorging themselves on the trivial, on entertainment — with no Orwellian Ministry of Information needed at all.

In a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, an American named Neil Postman figured out nearly 30 years ago that what we were going to get wasn’t Orwell’s world at all, but rather a version of Huxley’s. And while the British seem to be adept at imagining dystopias, I have to say that we Americans seem to be pretty handy at creating them. In the US now, we clearly live in Huxley’s world: news has become entertainment; political discourse, when not an oxymoron, tends to be shallow. So many of the institutions and processes that have served us well for hundreds of years are breaking down.

Much of this is due to the nature of digital technology and the Internet, allowing massive amounts of new conversation, of news without context. The thing that digital technology is best at is closing gaps: in time, in space, in relevance — and that has put real stress on our institutions. Technology is not neutral — it makes many things easier, but also many things more difficult. There are winners and losers.

Clay Shirky, writing on the massive dislocations occurring today in the newspaper industry wrote: “That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in place.”

And things do feel broken today, in many ways — the forces of dystopia seem to be on the rise.
But even so, there is a lot — A LOT — to be optimistic about. The hints of a positive future show all around us. The seeds of utopia are in the ground, so to speak.

• Take FixMyStreet, here in the UK — collective intelligence to help find and fix problems.
• And Ushahidi, which started in Kenya but has become global.
• And CrisisCommons.org to coordinate responses to crises around the globe.
• And the Sunlight Foundation, which resulted in support for OpenCongress.org among many others.
• And even the directive to all US agencies to break down barriers to transparency, participation and collaboration, which President Obama signed on his very first day in office.

So clearly there are real opportunities here, shaped by the natural affordances of Internet and digital technology.

What we know from the work we’ve done at Mozilla on Firefox and other open source projects, is that the way we organize, the technology we use, and the customs we support — what Tim O’Reilly has called “architectures of participation” — matter greatly. Architectures of participation, like technologies themselves, aren’t neutral. Projects like Wikipedia and Mozilla Firefox have architectures that are designed to bring in collaborators from everywhere, at every level. We have very serious contributors who spend most of their time working on the core. We have nearly 100 teams working on localizing Firefox into their own language. We have entrepreneurs building companies based on extensions to the browser. We have tens of thousands of people who test our browser each night and report issues. And we have hundreds of millions of users. We’ve built architectures of participation to get people engaged in as many ways as we can.

So what’s the future utopia that’s possible with digital technology? Ideally what we get — what we create — is a system where citizens are engaged, where they feel valued and connected with their governments and each other. Where our leaders are accountable — and desire to be accountable. It’s a future where it’s just as easy to help your neighborhood as it is to help your country or your planet.
To get there, we’ll need to architect with a few key principles in mind:

1. Transparency – where most of today’s efforts are, and critical to how we start
2. Clarity – flip side of scale – not the same as transparency — often, transparency of information can overwhelm — without a narrative, without intent, it’s very difficult to understand the implications of the transparency itself
3. Engagement – get everyone more educated and informed and contributing – get subject experts involved
4. Scale – must consider neighborhood government to municipal to national to transnational
5. Heterogeneity – life is increasingly cross-border, in all senses – trans-national – trans-company – mixture of public and private life

So my provocation turns out to be more of an exhortation, a call to action. As technologists and entrepreneurs and leaders of government, it’s our opportunity — and our responsibility — to imagine and articulate good, positive architectures of government, to engage with our colleagues and neighbors and coworkers and constituents to envision robust models for the future, in the context of ubiquitous, cheap, immediate information technology — and then to get on with making the world the way we want it.

I’ve written about my trip there before on this blog; they’ve also put up a page with a video about our conversation there on Transparency. It was a unique and amazing experience — and an interesting conversation and day took place. As the video makes pretty clear, a lot of people came in with the expectation of talking primarily about physical and architectural transparency, but I’ve been more interested in transparency as a metaphor — as a way to live your life, as a way to manage organizations. A lot of interesting ideas came out of the blending of physical and metaphorical ideas of what transparency is.

Of course, in my time at Mozilla this has been a theme we’ve come back go again and again, as we try to learn and discover how to lead effectively in an organization built on ideals of transparency. (That isn’t the only ideal, and there are many others that it interacts with regularly, but it is an important one for us.)

Leading transparently is often hard – it’s tough to know how to be most effective, how to get things done – and often, being transparent seems to be counterproductive. John Maeda, after spending his first year as President of RISD trying to be as transparent as possible, wrote this piece on transparency versus clarity, and a lot of things clicked for me as I read it – I’ve come back to it often over the past year or so.

And then the Wikileaks/Afghanistan papers situation occurred — and while leaking confidential information is nothing new, I think that the scope of the information leaked, and the way that it was leaked, is something that is quite modern. It raises a serious question: is it even possible to keep secrets in organizations and governments now? Should it be? Is this new transparency good, destructive, a little bit of both, or is it just too early to tell?  Jeff Jarvis posted a nice piece for thinking about this a couple of weeks back.

I’ve got lots of thoughts here, as you might imagine — living and breathing Mozilla over the past 5 years has made some things very clear and others not so much but not that many answers myself, so I’d love to hear (and engage with) a broad range of thoughts on this during the week.

I’m very happy to be moderating this Glass House Conversation online. Please contribute.

While fights over jurisdictional basis will provide ample material for debate and discussion, what’s most important is that the open Internet principles are adopted. An open Internet is essential to the continued innovation, growth, and entrepreneurship that has changed our lives and created a host of new opportunities.

Let’s not forget, the Internet is young. For example, it’s been roughly 7,000 days since the announcement of the world wide web. Who would have predicted its impact on our lives in this short period? Companies like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook didn’t even exist 2,200 days ago. There is no dispute that the web has facilitated profound social, economic, and even political change all around the world. Even notions that were once new like “ecommerce” have faded away, as now, nearly all forms of commerce touch upon or utilize the Internet. Remember when we even wondered whether people would shop online? A 2009 study by Professor John Quelch published in the Harvard Business Review estimated that the web accounted for $85 billion in annual retail transactions.

Openness is the quintessential quality of the Internet upon which all of these developments are founded. Given our experience in this short time, what the next 7,000 days will look like is no doubt uncertain. What is certain, however, is that if we fail to preserve and protect the open Internet, we risk losing the full promise of the web. That’s a risk not worth taking, especially in light of what we’ve seen so far.

We commend the Commission for its efforts to strike the proper balance of preservation without over-reaching. What Chairman Genachowski has proposed demonstrates exceptional awareness of the importance of preserving key principles of Internet openness without wholesale over-regulation.

1. In general, the Net has been neutral for the really explosive innovation phase over the last 15 years or so. Much of what’s being proposed is about protecting that.

2. There’s good experience & real data from around the world that supports neutrality as we move from the first phase of broadband rollout to the next. If you have the time, I highly encourage you to read the FCC-commissioned Broadband Study from the Berkman Center (with Yochai Benkler as Primary Investigator) [PDF link]. There’s actual data in it (a lot of it) and worldwide experience that we can use to develop our own policy.

3. Making sure that the mobile Internet is as open as the wired Internet has been is crucial. We need 1 global Internet, not a collection of non-open ones.

Beyond all that, it’s worth taking the time to read the Chairman’s speech of a couple of weeks back. It’s a fantastic and inspirational speech.

This is my 2nd post about the Aspen Institute event on the future of journalism — more on what went on & some thoughts I have. It’s long overdue, and is a follow-on post to this earlier post.

Here’s my punchline: I leave Aspen with no doubt that there is a crisis for traditional metro newspapers, and many will not survive. But I have to say that beyond some nostalgia, that doesn’t make me feel very bad, because I also leave with the sense that while there’s much change ahead for journalism as a profession and an industry, there’s no crisis. There’s significant innovation happening and new opportunities opening up for talented & dedicated people to find.

So I guess I leave Aspen optimistic, and much more optimistic than I expected to be.

The Format

There were about 50 people, give or take, which I understand is relatively large for an Aspen Institute event. The morning sessions were about 3 hours or so, with all of us around a (very large) table (picture above), moderated by Charlie Firestone — he’s an exceptional moderator, great at figuring out when to let everyone go into depth and when to move on. After lunch each day we had smaller breakout sessions, facilitated by various leaders (my 2 were led by Jeff Jarvis of CUNY and Sue Gardner of Wikimedia) — those went a couple of hours and then the leaderes worked on a synthesis and summary to present to the whole group the next day.

I talked with a few people who had been to events like this before, and I guess this felt a little bit on the large side, but with pretty great engagement and participation by some really outstanding people.

I will note that it was not a particularly diverse group — white men over 40 dominated — but there were a number of women that participated, and a few other non-white-men. But with a subject like this — and in particular with it’s relevance to how democracy works (or doesn’t work) — I think we’d all be best served with more diversity of thought & background.

Some Things That We’ve Talked About

We started the sessions Monday by talking about the Knight Commission on the Needs of Communities in a Democracy — Marissa, who’s co-chair, gave an update on their progress and some thoughts about what may be in the report when they issue it later this year. It’s going to be a report worth reading, and highlights both concerns about where journalism may be failing us as a democracy and some potential solutions.

That’s framed a lot of our discussions this week — the idea that democracies need certain services, some provided by journalists, to succeed and thrive. And John Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, started with a definition: that journalism provides the information needed [for people] to be free and self-governing. (from The Elements of Journalism, by Kovach and Rosenstiel)

I struggle with the focus on American journalism, for what it’s worth. I don’t know that that’s the right way to think about the characteristics that are important for an engaged citizenry — because, clearly, there are other places in the world today where certain aspects of informing citizens are being much better served than here in the US. Still, I think that Scott Lewis (CEO of voiceofsandiego.org) said it best (I’m paraphrasing): “We’re not really here to talk about saving newspapers or journalists’ jobs — but there are some beautiful parts of the history of journalism in America, and we’re here to talk about which those are and how to preserve the most beautiful and necessary in a time of change.”

Scott’s got it right, I think. It’s not really about “saving” or “preserving” institutions — it should be about figuring out what we need in a modern world, what’s possible with technology, and what characteristics and skills and ethics should be non-negotiable.

One thing that I found particularly interesting is that there’s not much concern at all about national & international publications — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or The Financial Times, to name a few. The consensus is that those institutions, while under pressure and experimenting, will figure out how to survive. The most concern was about local papers, really, and about the loss of investigative journalism. And I think the basic assumption that most people here are making is that most metro newspapers will not be able to survive, at least not without change that will make them unrecognizable.

That, too, seems right to me, and I have to say that I’m not too sorry about this development. Local papers were always geographically-based monopolies — vertical integrations of information that had high barriers to entry due to the cost of printing & distribution & ad sales. It seems okay to me that they’ll go away, by and large (because I think you’ll get what you most need in different ways — classifieds by things like CraigsList, sports news from any number of places, local event information from hyper-local blogs, and investigative reporting from a couple of new classes of org that I’ll talk about below). It’s sad when newspapers disappear, for sure — many of these are 50 or 100 year institutions that have served their public well — but I think that in the overall scheme of things, this is not such a terrible problem.

The breakup of these vertically integrated companies will mean that there’s a much more complicated creation chain that will happen, and that we’ll get our news and information in increasingly unique (to each of us) ways. I’m most hopeful that this will allow smaller, more focused organizations to contribute however they’re best able to contribute. I think that will mean a mix of non-profit and for-profit, a mix of big & small, a mix of points-of-view, purposes, and ways of working. I think there is no doubt that this will be a hugely chaotic time as we evolve into what’s next, and I think it will be some time while we all learn how to read again (understanding point-of-view, and the way that stories are constructed), but eventually we’ll be in a better place than ever.

I’m encouraged by the work of many of the attendees, but in particular these: Voice of San Diego, the Center for Investigative Research, and Pro Publica.

Why I Came

I don’t know very much about journalism — next to nothing, really. But I do think that some aspects of journalism are critical if you want to have an engaged citizenry — a strong & free press is essential for any of us to know and understand enough about the world we live in to participate and engage. I think, too, that there are aspects of our American press that have historically served  us extremely well and are worth preserving. And of course, it’s impossible not to see the turmoil and change that the whole sector is going through — the disappearance of major papers is only the most visible. One thing I think I hadn’t really internalized is that the global economic crisis is really changing the situation much more rapidly than usually happens. Because of the financial pressure, old institutions don’t have the buffer that they might have had in better times — leading to much shorter time frames to layoffs and shutdowns. I think much of this was coming anyway — the crisis just accelerated all of it.

I’ve also been struck lately by some of the parallels of  mission of journalists (roughly, to enable engaged & informed participation) and Mozilla  (to insure an open & participatory Internet). So that’s one reason I decided to come — to learn as much as I could.

The third reason I decided to come is that there’s something new afoot in the world: lots of organizations are being created to serve a public interest — on very low cost models (enabled essentially by the Web) — and competing with traditional profit-oriented ventures. At Mozilla we call that type of organization a “hybrid,” and Mark Surman has been writing about that idea a lot lately. For that, I came in the spirit of sharing what we’ve learned at Mozilla as we’ve become a sustainable hybrid company — maybe some of what we’ve learned can be helpful to others.

But I have to say that mostly I came, as with any event, is because of the other people who were planning to attend and participate. I was invited by Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the Knight Foundation, and all around awesome person. He’s done much since coming to Knight to reform the way they supported and funded new organizations, starting programs like the Knight News Challenge, as a way to create a sort of prize economy around innovations in journalism. (They’ve also provided funding for work at PCF, where I’m on the board of directors.) What they’re doing at Knight is a model to be emulated, I think — lots of experiments, lots of support, lots of provocative questions.

But beyond just Alberto, here’s a sampling of some of the 50 or so people who are here: Vivian Shiller (CEO of NPR), Esther Dyson, Jeff Jarvis (CUNY Professor), Marissa Mayer (VP Google), Dean Singleton (Chair of the AP), Marcus Brauchli (Exec Ed of The Washington Post), Walter Isaacson (biographer & CEO of Aspen Institute), Madeline Albright (former US Secretary of State), Reed Hundt (former Chair FCC), Jon Leibowitz (Chair FTC), Michael Kinsley, Sue Gardner (ED of Wikimedia), Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist), Robert Rosenthal (ED of CIR), Paul Steigler (CEO of Pro Publica).

And those are just a few of the names I picked out looking at the list just now — it’s neat to be a part of such a small & accomplished group — and is especially great when it’s on a topic I’m just learning about.

Finally, and beyond all the basic reasons for coming, I’ve learned that it’s important to try to pop out of operational work from time to time. It’s easy in the day-to-day of Mozilla to get obsessed with solving problems, with getting roadblocks moved out, with the details of trying to make things work. But being too much in those details for too long means, for me, that I sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture — being around others in a new context helps to reframe the things that matter in work and in life.

So that’s why I’m here: to learn and to participate and to help where I can. It’s been a successful event from that perspective for me.

An amazing meeting in Beijing — Jimmy Wales seeing Chinese officials at the State Council Information Office. I met Jimmy in Dalian at the WEF event a year ago — he mentioned then that people in the Chinese government were interested in talking with him about Wikipedia. Rebecca’s got a great writeup on it, as she apparently saw Jimmy at this year’s WEF event there (The event last year is when I met Rebecca, too.) We live in interesting times.

Read this a few months ago, but haven’t posted, which is a little weird, considering how much it’s affected the way I think about the Internet. Anyway, the quick summary is that this is an incredibly important book, with an extremely important concept in it: generativity. It’s the idea that systems that are open, have standard interfaces, and are not controlled by single parties (or small groups of them) are generative — they tend to result in high degrees of innovation. Further, that the Internet is a very special case where it’s open in the right ways, on the right levels, with the right interfaces — and it’s been unprecedented in delivering innovation & user-centered designs to normal people. And, more than that, that there are some signals in the world that we’re heading in bad directions — we tend to gravitate towards closed, tethered systems — like the iPhone, Tivo or Kindle (all of which I myself own and use).

I’ve got lots more thought about this & technology life cycles, but the bottom line on JZ’s book is that everyone who’s trying to work on the Web and build something great should read it.