huridocs-tech Development of the Internet: Innovation and the Amateur Spirit

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## author     : nettime@bbs.thing.net
## date       : 29.12.99
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<http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue332/item7718.asp>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>From Fidonet to fortune

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

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

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

Mixed emotions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A symbiosis of innovation

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

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

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

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




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