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 5 of 5)

So part of the electromagnetic spectrum could be opened up to anyone who uses smart devices. The devices play nice with each other, the way routers do on the Internet -- your transmitter will check and if this particular frequency is not being used for the next 50 billionths of a second by another device, it'll send its data out on it.

The open spectrum proposal is not that we change the way the entire spectrum is regulated, but that we open up more of the spectrum for experimentation with new devices that would treat it as a commons. So it would still be illegal to transmit on the television stations' frequencies, the emergency frequencies, and others.

reason: Another battleground you write about is privacy. What issues there are most important to you?

Rheingold: Well, nothing is more important than political liberty. If you don't have that, then the other issues are somewhat moot. Surveillance by people who want to sell you things is annoying. Surveillance by a state that wants to control your behavior is much more important.

People trade in their privacy for two things. One is convenience -- it's convenient for Amazon to know things about my purchases, so it can recommend things to me. The other is security -- when you go to an airport you submit yourself to a search, because you want to be secure from terrorism. Recently we've seen the state use technology to invade the privacy of citizens to a huge extent. People have accepted this, presumably because they think that they'll be more secure.

If encryption were easy to use and instantiated in devices, then people would have the opportunity to anonymize their transactions. There's definitely a user interface issue, because only the most sophisticated users are going to use anything that's complicated at all. If you had a privacy control that you can switch on and off, that would enable more users to take control.

reason: You also write about peer-to-peer journalism. One aspect you discuss more on your blog than in the book is this phenomenon of "moblogs."

Rheingold: Well, I predicted it in the book, but it hadn't happened yet. It's now happening so much that I'm considering not blogging it anymore.

reason: What's the difference between a moblog and an ordinary weblog?

Rheingold: A weblog is a site where anyone, from their computer, can post to the Web. A moblog is a mobile blog, so you can use your mobile device -- a telephone, a video-equipped PDA [personal digital assistant] -- to post to the Web. To publish what you witness and what you think from anywhere you are to everyone in the world -- that's a big leap. Particularly now that we have the capability of publishing photos as well, and in some cases video.

The Rodney King video showed what happens when the cost of using a video camera drops to the point where you don't have to be a television professional to use one. Soon we'll see something happen in the world that's reported by one or more people from their mobile devices directly to the Internet before you see it on CNN or in The New York Times. Individuals have the ability to publicize events in a way that they have not had before, and that will ultimately affect the mass media, just as recently we saw the blogging about the Trent Lott affair having an effect on the political scene.

reason: A lot of the public seems to feel that after the dot-com crash, all technological change suddenly ended. Obviously, that isn't true. But to what extent is what you're writing about being restrained by recent developments in the marketplace?

Rheingold: It's important to note that the same thing happened with electricity and the railroads as well. There was a similar pattern: a world-changing discovery, and a lot of hype about it and utopian expectations and a financial bubble, and then a bust, with a lot of money being lost and a lot of businesses failing. And then, finally, some businesses picking up the pieces -- not necessarily the ones that were the pioneers -- and becoming very powerful. Ultimately, the changes were world-changing. So I think we can mistake the short-term events for the longer-term significance.

I think the financial losses in the high-tech and telecommunications and Internet sectors were so large that it's going to take several years to recover. But that does not mean that either technological progress or social innovation has stopped. Weblogging pretty much emerged as a social phenomenon after the Internet crash.

reason: A lot of people still associate the Whole Earth Catalog with the 1960s, even though the operation continues to this day. I was trying to think of ways that what you're writing about now is connected to what you were doing with Whole Earth, and the first thing that came to mind was the Catalog's credo, "Access to Tools."

Rheingold: Yes. In fact, it goes back a lot further than the '60s. It goes back to Emerson and "Self-Reliance." It's a pretty radically American idea: You don't have to rely on some distant institution, whether it's a government or a religion, to give you power and give meaning to your life if you have the tools and the knowledge and the freedom to do it for yourself.

In the '60s, it was about not relying on the particular culture and government of that time. But the general idea is not relying on any particular culture and government, when you have the power to do it yourself.