The Internet’s Third Act
We are now two decades into the Great Online Experiment. The Graphical Internet, born in 1993, is now 22 years old and no longer a teenager. The first decade of the experiment witnessed us poor dumb humans wrestling, cave man-like, with the tools we had created, struggling to understand how best to use the networked hardware and software governed by these new rules of free and open decentralized contribution. Marshall McLuhan would have said that the media and tools we had created were governing us, changing us. We found ourselves adapting to our creations, learning to type, tethered to desktops and laptops over screaming fax modems, hunched over and developing carpal tunnel syndrome. We took classes to learn how to use the machines on their terms. We placed bets on what it all meant and, of course, misunderstood everything for a long time, culminating in a bursting bubble of over-exuberant valuation of networked intelligence because we failed to fully grasp the infant cries of our new progeny. What follows is scaffolding I find helpful as we plot the trajectory of the Internet from infancy into adulthood, neatly divided (by me) into three decade-long acts.
Act One 1993–2003 Disintermediation
A decentralized networked intelligence that compresses energy, space and time has been dreamt of in science fiction for decades. The value of ambient awareness and accessible knowledge means more problems can be solved more quickly, and excess cost for connecting people and things can be wrung out of the system. The first Act of the Internet was about disintermediation.
Mozaic and Netscape
Mozaic was created by Marc Andreesen and colleagues at the University of Illinois and released as a beta product in September of 1993, creating a much needed, more approachable Internet interface. Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark teamed up shortly thereafter to create Netscape and release their Netscape Navigator browser free for non-commercial use. This finally allowed publishers and readers of content to connect in a consistent way. Ironically, one of their first market strategies was boxing up the free software and selling it in stores. Their spectacular IPO in August of 1995 launched the frenzy of exuberance that later became the dot com bubble bursting crash. For a while they owned the onramp, shared only minimally with AOL and other dial up modem walled garden Internet providers. But they failed to completely grasp what business they were in and later gave way to others with better insight on how to compress space and time.
The Disintermediators
The winners of this first Act took advantage of networked systems to extract value by eliminating what was no longer necessary. Disintermediation was made possible by making everyone more informed and removing great swaths of unnecessary middle transactions. Buyers finding sellers in the most efficient way possible meant lower costs and greater productivity. It began to improve GDP as well as personal buying power.
Amazon, eBay and Paypal all fully grasped the power of disintermediation and quickly created more direct paths for buyers and sellers of goods to reach each other and consummate transactions. eBay and Amazon have continued to prosper into the Second Act and are making the necessary adjustments to the coming Third Act.
Act Two 2004–2014 Capturing and Directing Human Attention
It is tempting to label the Second Act the Age of Social Media given the dizzying valuations companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have achieved in this Act. If we distill down to the basic utility of the winners in the second act they seem to be prospering by simply enabling new ways for human to human disintermediation, removing the friction in the seek and find game of social circles. I call it the Decade of Human Attention because that is the essence of the value being captured. The winners of the second act are, at their essence, simply capturing human attention by any means possible and monetizing that attention through the 20th century, tried-and-true method of advertising. If you want to understand what business a corporation is in, just follow the money. Examining the cash flow of McDonald’s Corporation, for example, reveals that you are not their customer when you buy a Big Mac. For the Corporation is not in the food business, but in the real estate business, buying desirable locations and leasing those positions to franchisees along with equipment and processes that ensure that lease payments are made on time.
Social Media
Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter and Snapchat are examples of winners in the Second Act. Social Media is the name we have given the mechanics of connection that these systems employ. But follow the money and you see that their “product” is human attention, which they package and sell to advertisers. In some cases they charge for access to that attention or the data exhaust created by all of that attention, which, again, is craved by advertisers seeking to divine what people want, or in its worst form, influence what people will want in the future.
Youtube, which now belongs to Google, looks revolutionary in its mechanics for allowing anyone to express themselves in video and program their own channels the way CBS, ABC and NBC do. They even have the ability to directly monetize through advertising, while Google takes their share of the revenue capitalizing on the work and imagination of others.
In 2009 I was having lunch with two titans of the Information Age in a hotel in Orlando, Florida. Fred Brooks was the project manager for the IBM Mainframe 360. It was he who decided there would be 8 bits in a byte. He also wrote the bible for software project management “The Mythical Man Month”. Across from him sat Alan Kay, the Xerox Park pioneer who designed the first laptop computer, the first graphical interface and object oriented computing. We eventually found ourselves reflecting on the staggering valuations all of these companies had, for essentially doing old tricks with the new tools that seemed far beneath any of our hopes for technology. We were still, almost a decade after the internet bubble burst, talking about eyeballs instead of curing cancer and populating the stars. As Alan put it “We have all of this amazing technology and we just want to use it as a mirror”. And Wall Street seems to value that most.
In 2006 Doc Searle posted an article[i] bemoaning this treatment of everyone on the Net as “eyeballs” or “consumers” who need to be “messaged” until they bought something. He named his article “The Intention Economy” and subsequently wrote a book with the same name. I read this book as a natural extension of the “Cluetrain Manifesto” posted back in 1999 that essentially stated that the disintermediating power of the Net will (or should) render all of the traditional marketing and advertising tricks obsolete as markets “get smarter faster than Corporations”. Individuals should now be empowered by technology and not let themselves become the product. But, as we all know, if you aren’t paying for it, you are very likely the product. The beneficiaries of social media are not its users. I took a stab at a Searle and Cluetrain-inspired manifesto for my company here.
I truly do believe that the new technologies are so much more than new ways to do the old things. The Internet’s Third Act is where I believe our awkward teenage creation becomes an adult and begins to contribute to a more positive future for mankind.
[i] http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000035
Act Three 2015–2025 Cognitive Coupling and the Noösphere
“We are as gods and may as well get good at it” — Stewart Brand
If the last act was about human attention, this next, and likely, vastly more important act, will be about more intelligent attention. It will be about harmonizing the interface between humans and networked machines to create new capacities. For the human is still at the center of this age, only now more super- empowered, having conquered the tools and bent them more to our collective will so that they serve us on our terms. They will do our bidding and create humans, as Hans Moravec puts it, “In more potent form”.
In 2011 I took part in a DARPA ISAT study called Cognitive Coupling. For one year we studied methods for more direct connection between human minds, as well as better connections between those minds and networked machines. I won’t, and can’t, go into more detail about where we went (and where it is likely still going today), but I thought you deserved to know where my title for the Third Act originated.
This idea of humans working to guide the evolution of our networked intelligence is the harbinger of the Third Act. This is the dawn of the Super Human Age when we master our tools and begin solving the myriad existential problems that face mankind.
Winners in this act are likely to be those companies who are seeking the intersection between the cognitive and psychological sciences, and developing better interfaces that exploit and combine human strengths with machine strengths.
Intelligence Amplification
IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Hololens, Google’s Deep Mind and my modest company Szl’s, Nomibot and Tanjo are all focused on ambient interfaces to the increasingly intelligent network of humans and machines cooperating with each other. There is a revolution in sensors and computing capacity that, when ultimately paired with the “Internet of Things”, will render virtually every thing and person on the planet transparent to discovery and inquiry. We know that the Internet and search make an already intelligent person more intelligent. This new capacity we are developing will make anyone wielding it super human. Any one not completely fluent with these new abilities will not only be outperformed by those who are, but will be considered handicapped.
The culmination of this combining of networked human and machine brains brings to mind Teilhard’s concept of the Noösphere; a new natural system that quickens human evolution towards Hans Moravec’s “humans in more potent form”.
Richard Boyd is CEO and co-founder of SZL.it Inc in Durham, NC.
