Is That a Computer in Your Pants?

Cyberculture chronicler Howard Rheingold on smart mobs, smart environments, and smart choices in an age of connectivity

Jesse Walker from the April 2003 issue

(Page 4 of 5)

Rheingold: I'm not that much of a road warrior, but when I traveled publicizing the book, I carried a Handspring Treo that enables me to download and upload e-mail very easily and quickly to the Sprint network. And it was invaluable. I could get e-mail from a journalist who wanted an interview while I was in a taxicab from the airport and have the interview arranged by the time I got to the hotel. That was very useful to me. It definitely changed my life.

reason: Would you want to wear a computer?

Rheingold: It depends on how much control I have over it, and its price. But yeah, sure. I like to use my MP3 player, I like to use my mobile phone, and there are times when I want to send and receive e-mail on the run. If all that can be combined into something I can wear, then why not?

Again, it depends on how much control I have over it. I don't want to be called all the time -- I want to be able to roll it over to voice mail if I need to. I definitely don't want to be spammed that I can get 25 cents off a burger every time I pass a McDonald's. A lot of it's going to depend on what the experience in the environment is of actually using it.

reason: And a lot of that depends on politics.

Rheingold: I think the overall conflict over emerging technologies is going to be whether we'll be active users who shape the medium, as we were with the personal computer and the Internet, or passive consumers who don't have influence over the medium, as we were in the days of three television networks and one telephone company. That's what a lot of these political conflicts over the regulation of new technologies are about.

Another aspect is that vested interests resist technologies that challenge their existing business model.

reason: One of the most interesting political battles you describe is the debate over wireless local area networks, or WiFi.

Rheingold: Telephone companies have paid governments around the world large amounts of money, upwards of $150 billion, for "3G" licenses, to create the "third generation" high-speed data networks to our devices. This is a big, top-down, very expensive infrastructure in which portions of the spectrum are auctioned off to the highest bidders, who have exclusive control of that part of the spectrum for their business purposes.

With WiFi technology, if you install a small card in your PC and another small base station from your Internet connection, you can project wireless Internet access to a small area. If a number of these, coming from the grassroots, link together, then you can have grassroots networks. So we've got broadband Inter-net access that doesn't rely on this 3G system. And it operates in the unlicensed band, so citizens don't need to have a license, like the 3G companies do, to operate.

So here we've got a conflict between a citizen-operated grassroots broadband system and a telco-operated top-down infrastructure, and the battle is being fought not on the level of technology but on the level of regulation. How is the FCC going to regulate the spectrum?

That is just one of several different emerging technologies that challenge the idea that spectrum should be regulated as property that is exclusively owned. This form of regulation is based on the kind of radio that we had in the 1920s. We now have radio that's much more intelligent in its devices than we had back then, and it's possible that we can treat the spectrum as a commons, as we have the Internet.

reason: What do you mean by a commons?

Rheingold: You don't have to buy a license to own a piece of the Internet. Anyone can send bits on the Internet. No one owns the whole thing. That doesn't mean that you can't have a capitalistic enterprise -- it didn't stop Jerry Yang from becoming a billionaire or Google from becoming a billion-dollar business.

It's the difference between the highways and the railroads. You have to be a railroad company to run a train on a railroad, and the schedules are very, very closely coordinated from the top down so the trains don't run into each other. You don't have to own a highway to use it, and people determine how they get to their own destinations.