I am attracted to Steve Mann’s vision of cyborg communities as alliances of individuals who have taken charge of their technological extensions, but the pace and invasiveness of prosthetic engineering development cry out for a cautionary approach to the future of embodiment. In March 2002, British robotics scientist Kevin Warwick, hoping to perfect techniques for curing spinal cord injuries in the future, implanted several hundred tiny sensors into the main nerve in his left arm, connected to a radio transceiver that can exchange signals with a remote computer.52 Ellul would say that technique would not stop its incursion when spinal cord injuries are cured but would continue to invade human organs and more closely mesh the human nervous system with the technical exoskeleton of networked computers. Do we have to give up part of our humanity to enable the paralyzed to walk? Didn’t Faust face a similar decision in Goethe’s parable about the price of the power of modernism?53
Which characteristics of the flesh should and could be sequestered from the attractions and colonizations of technique? If some people live in smart mobs as cyborgs, how will that change those people who remain embodied in the traditional manner, and how will the two groups negotiate coexistence? Twentieth-century science fiction explored many of these questions. In the twenty-first century, the cyborgs are no longer fictional. It’s not too outlandish, given the direction of scientific development, to ask how human our grandchildren are likely to be—and how decisions we make now will affect our descendants.
What Do We Need to Know?
Before anyone can make intelligent decisions about what to do with smart mob technologies, more people need more reliable, practical knowledge about the following issues:
How to regulate the mobile Internet in ways that free innovation and promote competition without undermining the foundations of democratic societies
The interdisciplinary dynamics of cooperation systems, natural and artificial
The cognitive, interpersonal, and social effects of mobile, pervasive, always-on media
How ubiquitous mobile Internet access and information embedded in places might reshape cities
New laws and regulations are attempting to turn Internet “users” into passive “consumers.” Recent political decisions are locking onto the familiar model of traditional broadcast-era mass media—“content” fed through monopoly-controlled, metered, one-way pipelines to passive consumers. The Internet grew and innovated explosively because every node that can receive content can also send content through an unfenced, any-to-any network in which large commercial enterprises coexist with millions of noncommercial or small commercial operators. Internet users were not passive consumers but the “prosumers” the Tofflers had predicted in the 1980s.54 Just because the new medium has come from an innovation-rich and universally accessible commons doesn’t guarantee that it will remain that way; radio and television were tamed in their day.
The U.S. Congress’s and FCC’s laws and rulings over the next few years will make the difference between a traditional broadcast model and a peer-to-peer model for wireless Internet. In the future, U.S. policies favoring multinational corporations probably will be incorporated in the international intellectual property treaty frameworks that are being put into place around the world. So far, decisions have favored large intellectual property owners, removed common carriage and public access responsibilities from cable and telephone companies, and confined new wireless technologies to tiny sectors of spectrum, reserving the rest for the exclusive use of license-holders invested in established technologies.55 Indeed, the most realistic prediction is that unless some new pressures are brought to bear and the U.S. and global regulatory process changes its present course, mobile and pervasive technologies won’t be used by smart mobs at all but will be more aptly described by the science fiction story The Marching Morons.56
The telecommunications industry is not the only group of vested interests who have attempted to prevent innovation and to turn active technology users into passive consumers of prepackaged content. Hollywood studios were concerned that the advent of television would render movies obsolete and sought to crush the emerging medium; the studios were thwarted by Walt Disney, who needed to put his movies on TV in order to raise money to build Disneyland.57 The Motion Picture Association of America’s chief lobbyist in Washington, D.C., Jack Valenti, fought to prevent the sale of video cassette recorders to consumers, testifying before Congress that the “VCR is to the American film industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone”; electronics manufacturers such as Sony successfully opposed Valenti’s efforts.58 With digital television broadcasts on the horizon, Hollywood lobbyists (again led by Valenti) have formed the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group to lobby for legislation that casts a dark shadow on future innovation in the telecommunication, computer hardware, and open source software industries.59 I turned to Cory Doctorow, who now works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public-interest organization working on behalf of citizens, to explain the recent un-derpublicized but potentially damaging lobbying campaign:
Despite the fact that VCRs did not kill movies and in fact became a major revenue source for Hollywood studios, the studios fear that digital TV will make it too easy to trade movies via the Internet. The BPDG is asking the U.S. Congress to create a mandatory standard that would give Hollywood veto power over any future technology capable of interacting with DTV.60 This means that any future inventor of a technology that could be used with DTV will have to promise that the invention won’t be used in a computer unless the computer is also approved by Hollywood; if they don’t make this legally binding promise, the inventor won’t be allowed to license the device for manufacture. DTV devices and computers share the same technologies, so a law to protect DTV could give Hollywood total control over the design specifications of future computers. Hollywood doesn’t want any open source software interacting with DTV, because DTV can be modified by users. Effectively, this would amount to a ban on open source software. Hollywood was unsuccessful in shutting down previous technologies because technology companies fought their attempts to do so, but this time, technology companies are cooperating.
The mandatory standard proposed by BPDG is only the first regulatory step. DTV receivers will also have analog outputs, to which one could connect analog-to-digital converters and effectively remove all such protection, which led the Motion Picture Association of America to ask the Senate Judiciary Committee for a second mandate requiring all analog-to-digital converters to be equipped with a “cop chip” that will check for digital watermarks indicating that the converter is being used to digitize copyrighted work.61 The cop chip would have the power to shut down the offending device. If you video record your child’s first steps, and a Mickey Mouse cartoon is playing on a TV in the background, the cop chip will shut down your recorder. If you talk on your mobile phone while walking down the street and somebody drives by with their window open and their car radio is playing a copyrighted song, the cop chip will shut down your phone.
Finally, Hollywood is calling for a redesign of the Internet to stop p2p file sharing, which amounts to a proposed ban on decentralized packet switching in favor of centralized networks that can be monitored for acts of infringement.62
Recent legal and regulatory actions are the first moves of a thus far successful campaign to lock down the formerly freewheeling Internet and return to the days of three television networks and one telephone company, when customers were consumers and no one sliced into profits with their own businesses or challenged old technologies with new ones.63 This time, the dinosaurs are well aware of the dangers from the mammals and are taking big thumping steps to protect themselves. Most people aren’t clear about what is at stake in this game, and those who could inform us, journalists, work for enterprises now owned by the dinosaurs.
The rights of citizens to consume a large variety of information as well as to disseminate their own information widely are held to be fundamental public goods in the United States. Yale
professor Yochai Benkler wrote in 2000 about the importance of diverse media to First Amendment rights:
In a series of cases in which the Supreme Court reviewed various media regulations, the Court has steadily developed an understanding that decentralization of information production is a policy that serves values central to the First Amendment. Most pithily captured in Justice Black’s statement in United States v. Associated Press, since adopted in other cases in this line— Red Lion and the two Turner cases—it is central to the values served by the First Amendment that we secure “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources.64
Two centuries before Benkler, James Madison wrote the words that are carved in marble at the Library of Congress: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”65
If political decisions do leave people free to invent new varieties of smart mobs, the most important knowledge for designers and users of smart mob technologies could come from a comprehensive investigation of the dynamics of cooperation. Although the interdisciplinary studies discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 indicate a broad basis for such a body of knowledge, the gaps in what we know now are large enough to make the difference between higher levels of cooperation and a world in which nothing really works the way it’s supposed to, and nobody understands why. Before attempting to build social accounting systems, we have to understand that we’ve only begun to understand how they work and how they can be cheated.
The hubris inherent in the idea of computerized reputation systems must be acknowledged, especially by those who design them. Although the first analyses of reputation systems in online markets indicates some hope for developing automated social accounting systems, common sense cautions that when it comes to characterizing the trustworthiness of human beings, errors can unfairly despoil the reputation of good citizens and loopholes can amplify the trust level of sophisticated cheaters. Such thus-far unquantified behaviors as redemption, maturation, and other forms of personal character change are not well represented by mathematical models of reputational data. As Ellul, Weizenbaum, and most religious systems contend, not every part of human nature can or should be digitized.
Considering the possible value of such knowledge to a humankind on the brink of six kinds of self-destruction, broad research into the precise dynamics of cooperation, management of common pool resources, and the powers and limits of social accounting systems could yield enormous benefits for the commons and for pioneering private enterprises.
The cognitive and social impacts of mobile and pervasive technologies are largely unknown, the potential for negative side effects is high, and the possibility of unexpected emergent behaviors is nearly certain. Before individuals, families, or communities can make decisions about how to adopt, use, constrain, or appropriate emerging technologies, we need better information about what mobile and pervasive media do to our minds and societies.
We need to know more about the ways mobile and pervasive media are changing the way people use cities, because the changes are well underway. Steven Johnson revealed in Emergence how “cities, like ant colonies, possess a kind of emergent intelligence: an ability to store and retrieve information, to recognize and respond to patterns in human behavior.”66 Swarming supported by texting and mobile telephony, untethered ubiquitous Internet access, location-aware services, and device-readable information associated with specific places are only the beginnings of significant changes in the way people use urban spaces.
“Even before wireless access, we saw people leaving their cubicles to work on park benches with their laptops and cell phones,” said Anthony Townsend, the same research scientist at New York University’s Taub Urban Research Center and NYCWireless cofounder we met in Chapter 6.67 When I called Townsend to talk about community wireless networking, we also talked about the way changes in communication practices influence the way people use cities. I knew that he had written about the subject: “The modern city of office towers is as much an artifact of the invention of the telephone as the decentralization of manufacturing and residences to the suburbs.”68 Wireless Internet access points provided by NYCWireless in Washington Square Park in 2001 and Bryant Square Park in 2002 are changing the way the people who work in those neighborhoods go about their business—in ways that Townsend believes can be more convivial than constant confinement in cubicles.
As an urban researcher, Townsend sees both opportunities and dangers. “The digital divide with location-based services,” he told a reporter in 2001, “is going to be about who controls the information about your community. When I go to Harlem, do I get information that’s created by the residents of Harlem, or by Yahoo! in Santa Clara, or by Verizon and the Yellow Pages?”69 Townsend believes swarming is already accelerating urban metabolism and that wide diffusion of mobile devices and citywide information structures has created new feedback patterns he calls “the real-time city.” He has warned urban planners that “the city will change far faster than the ability to understand it from a centralized perspective, let alone formulate plans and politics that will have the desired outcomes.”70
William J. Mitchell, professor of architecture at MIT, foresaw in 1995 that mobile, pervasive, and wearable media would turn future cities into even more complex information systems than they already are. In City of Bits, Mitchell argued that designers and planners need to think about the kind of lives people want to live, not just the mechanics of digging up streets and installing fiber optic cables.71 In 2001, Mitchell noted the use of mobile telephones to facilitate swarming by people who “rely on their electronics to deliver relevant information at the right moment, to guide them where they want to go, and to tell them what they will find when they get there. In SwarmCity.org, landmarks are physical places that (maybe temporarily) have lots of electronic pointers in their direction. And obscure backwaters are just places without pointers.”72
Adding dynamic, location-specific information to cities is changing them, but without adequate knowledge of the dynamics of such changes and of how people would prefer their lives to change, there is no guarantee that new uses of communication technology will improve the urban experience. We need to understand the kinds of shifts in pedestrian experience enabled by swarming, observe the way people prefer to work when information and communication access is untethered from desktops, and balance technical and political issues in negotiating standards for informating places. If this understanding can be applied widely, smart mob technology could do more than spawn surveillance, cyborgs, flocking teenage-culture consumers, and swarming terrorists. If we know what we’re doing, perhaps we could enable cooperation amplification through smart mob infrastructure, the way dedicated dreamers transformed computers from weapons into telescopes of the mind.
Cooperation Amplification
With all the dangers, threats, and pitfalls of smart mob technology, why bother with it?
The answer to this question is the same one that could have been given to the same question asked when language, writing, and printing were introduced: Creating knowledge technologies and applying them to larger and larger scales of cooperative enterprise is inextricable from what it is to be human. Cognitive scientist Andy Clark believes that humans have been cyborgs for some time, “not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the most profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry.”73 By “non-biological circuitry,” Clark means the combination of external technologies and internal knowledge skills involved in encoding and exchanging knowledge through alphabets, numbers, and images. Clark calls these media and the literacies that make them broadly useful “mindware upgrades,” which not only have extend
ed human cognitive abilities but have transformed them.
Clark believes that future cognitive technologies will make it harder to draw the line between tool and user: “What are these technologies? They include potent, portable machinery linking the user to an increasingly responsive World Wide Web. But they include also, and perhaps ultimately more importantly, the gradual smartening up and interconnection of the many everyday objects which populate our homes and offices.” 74 Clark’s notions support the conjecture that smart mobs in computation-pervaded environments could enable some people to transform the way they think and the way civilization operates, the way some people used printing presses, literacy, the scientific method, and new social contracts to transform feudalism into modernism. Enlightenment rationality has its limits, but the reason it is called “the Enlightenment” is that the changes enabled by the systematic use of reason, aided by mathematics and literacy, represented a step toward a more democratic and humane world. Part of taking that step involved learning to think in new ways, aided by cognitive technologies— learning to become new kinds of humans.
It would be a mistake, Clark cautions, to try to nail “human nature” down to what humans used to be, because “ours are (by nature) unusually plastic brains whose biologically proper functioning has always involved the recruitment and exploitation of non-biological props and scaffolds. More so than any other creature on this planet, we humans emerge as natural- born cyborgs, factory tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures: ones whose systematic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull.” 75 Clark doesn’t claim a final word on the subject, but he declares the opening of a new territory for cognitive science research—the dynamics of human-technology symbiosis. “Understanding what is distinctive about human reason thus involves understanding the complementary contributions of both biology and (broadly) speaking technology, as well as the dense, reciprocal patterns of causal and co-evolutionary influence that run between them.”76
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