Can we overcome our broken digital commons ?

A dive into interop, digital events and much more with 2 questions and a prediction with Alistair Croll

Alistair Croll is a Montréal-based startup founder (Coradiant), author (Lean Analytics), and conference organizer (O’Reilly’s Strata; Techweb’s Cloud Connect; Interop’s Enterprise Cloud Summit; the International Startup Festival; and GigaOm’s Structure).

Q1 We have what I perceive to be a broken digital commons that we’re forced to live with and this interview is actually a good testament to this: we had to troubleshoot and move from google meet to zoom because there is no interoperability like email like TCP/IP. What do you see as the next wave of digital life for both work and play ?

Alistair Croll: It’s because we haven’t tackled the real problem, which is how we pay for our online lives.

There’s an interoperable protocol between most web chat apps called webRTC. It’s widely supported across Chromium, Firefox, and many other browsers. We could use it for this very call. But that isn’t the problem — the problem is that when we moved from a product to a service model for technology, we ended our ability to run those products at scale for free.

Open source is alive and well. Most of the big cloud platforms run on open source software. But they charge a fee to operate it for you, and they have shareholders and terms of service. Open source proponents wore the wrong tinfoil hat on: They should have been worrying about rent-taking atop their free software, but instead they focused on licenses.

I gave a speech back in 2012 called The Other War on General Purpose Computing that talked this idea that if we start to rely on digital services, then we allow rent taking for what amounts to our digital lives.

“In the physical world my reach is the soapbox”

“I have no digital voice without paying for it”

I’m not a big fan of Parler, but the censorship controversies surrounding its deplatforming are a cautionary tale for anyone trying to our online future. Parler showed us that freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.

In the physical world, my reach is the height of the soapbox I can stand on, and how loud my vocal cords are. That’s powered by sustenance, which in most democracies is guaranteed by the state to some degree.

The digital world is vastly different. I have no right to a soapbox. I have no digital voice. Sure, I can start my own blog, but I need a data center, someone to manage DNS records, and so on. There is huge convenience in modern social platforms like Facebook or Tiktok, and they’ve democratized digital expression immeasurably. Without them, only a very small technological elite would be able to set up and run their own digital platforms. And those platforms’ algorithms are governed by terms of service, policed by cultural norms, and optimized for engagement.

So we’re stuck with a tradeoff: Simplicity and widespread usage while free speech is curtailed; or true freedom for a rarefied few. Scale is compromise.

Here are a couple more examples:

• I can set up email with a few clicks, and get ads and surveillance; or I can install my own SMTP/IMAP server and run it myself. Open Source makes that second option possible, but that doesn’t translate into widespread accessibility.
• We could set up an entirely free web conferencing tool — in fact there are lots of services that do free open source web conferencing. You can just chat with someone on Discord. But who pays for the electricity?

Back to your question: The Digital Commons is broken because we made it about licensing, not about a sustainable business model that gives people an alternative to SaaS. Maybe that’s taxes; maybe it’s a digital bill of rights. But it definitely feels like we need to negotiate our inalienable rights for an online age. Until that time, free market capitalism pays for the Internet.

Here’s another example of the broken commons: There’s a good argument to be made that the government should provide a central digital identity repository like OAuth. “Why is it,” you might wonder, “that I’m okay signing in with Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn — companies with a profit motive that’s not aligned with my best interests, who live in a jurisdiction I have no authority over, where I have no ability to shape their policy; but that I’m not okay with the government of Canada managing identity?”

A national authentication system would not only simplify and secure sign-ins, it could also protect the most vulnerable from scams. If a less tech-savvy person who’s unfamiliar with technology is using a digital app that is suddenly considered bad, then the government of canada could say, “okay, your authentication for that malware-infected app is being revoked because they’re no longer a good actor.” And the public sector is accountable to voters, and has a legal system for hearing challenges and changing rules, that private Internet companies simply do not.

For some reason, we’re fine with the government building highways, but not providing identity services, which is nonsensical to me.

“Technology means nothing compared to human cognition”

Q2: What has your deep dive in the world of digital events taught you over this pandemic ?

Alistair: Technology means nothing compared to human cognition. The best talks I’ve given are those where I got the audience to close their eyes and think about something, or I told them a joke and made it part of the talk. It’s about state changes and defying expectations.

If it was true before that to educate someone you first need to engage them, now, when you’re competing with every other glowing rectangle vying for their attention in their life, figuring out how to keep them engaged is hard. As a speaker or event organizer, there’s a constant “what have you done for me lately?” question in the back of your mind.

My mantra throughout the last 18 months of the pandemic has been to convince people I will spend their time wisely, because that’s their most precious resource: Attention.

When the pandemic started, everyone was bemoaning the things we would lose as a result of it, such as not being able to meet in person. What they hadn’t realized back then is all things we would gain, like the ability to bring in a lineup from around the world. At FWD50 last November we had a conference with 240 speakers across five tracks and six days, and it went incredibly well. Don’t get me wrong: It took an amazing amount of preparation on the part of the team. But we had speakers join us who could never join us otherwise. We made free passes available to public servants from any municipality, province, territory or state and 79 regions around the world showed up.

Now that we’re starting to talk about going back into public spaces, we’re asking ourselves, “what do we now lose by going back to physical?” And we lose a lot.

I’ll give you an example. I talked to one event organizer, who had 26 000 attendees registered for their event. Most people expect only a fraction of that number to still be online by the end of the day — but instead, they had 52 000. They doubled their attendance, because people heard it was good and joined them. In the physical world, if I had wanted to go to a conference because the first session sounded great, it’s too late. I’m not going to buy a plane ticket, and get a hotel, and all that other stuff, because the conference will be over by the time I get there. But now, if the conference is really good and everyone I know is talking about it, I’m gonna go grab an online ticket. Your first talk can be a carrot to get people to sign up while the event is underway.

You just need to look at events with fresh eyes.

The biggest problem with events is the incredible lack of imagination, even as we have had an incredible acceleration of technologies that break time and space. I talked to a woman who is deaf, and she said that now she can go into a Google Hangout and turn on closed captioning and see whatever’s happening. Her workplace is way better.

Events aren’t better or worse, they’re different. The question is now, how do we bring some of these good things back into the physical world so we don’t lose them? Virtual events gave us accessibility, a lower carbon footprint, bringing in diverse voices into an event who might not have been there, and so on.

I expect to see a massive consolidation of the tech stacks. There are a lot of companies out there who made tools for physical events who just lazily popped a video frame into all of their event agendas and said now we’re a virtual events company. They’re going to die. But virtual-native companies that figure out how to then come back to the physical world will do well. Already you’re seeing Hopin use its sky-high valuation to buy Boomset and Attendify and Streamyard. They’re just rolling up that whole sector.

What’s your prediction for the next five years in your areas of interest ?

The thing I’m spending the most time on right now — in addition to digital government stuff and running events — is a book called Just Evil Enough. It’s intentionally a provocative name, because that’s how you capture attention.

The world of marketing has not been updated in a long time. We still think about product-market fit, but omit platforms, social norms, systems of attention, and more.

Every great startup has a secret in its closet. Every great brand rewrote the rules in its favor. If you want to succeed as a marketer in a modern market, you need a much broader understanding of your business. You need to find vulnerabilities — places where you have an asymmetric advantage. And you need to subvert the existing systems.

For example, we used to think about electric cars in terms of range and sustainability. Then Elon Musk showed up and said “no, it’s actually a performance, let me race this against a Bugatti.” He changed the frame by which people evaluated cars to benefit him.

Another example: Once upon a time, toothpaste was either clinical (“four out of five dentists agree”) or it was sexy (“fresh breath that lasts all night.”) And there was a brand for each frame: Crest was clinical, Colgate was sexy.

Tom’s of Maine showed up and found a market that thought that fluoride in the water was a government conspiracy. Where do those people shop? In health food stores. Tom’s gave them a better frame by which to compare toothpastes: Listing ingredients, and offering a fluoride-free option.

Two years later, they were selling toothpaste with fluoride at CVS, of course. But they gave the market a new thing to talk about that was more interesting to a specific group. I’m not saying we should encourage people to brush their kids’ teeth without fluoride, giving them horrible dental problems. But that subversive mindset is critical for businesses to thrive today.

“How do you find a way that the market has changed that exposes a vulnerability that gives you an advantage?” is how brands, candidates, and creators need to think. We ignore those realities. So that’s what Just Evil Enough is about.

I’m also spending a lot of time thinking about the tether between our physical and digital selves, which we touched on earlier. We’ve moved so much of our lives online that most people spend as much time as a digital self as they do as their physical self. We are increasingly becoming these “bags of meat” that are support systems for our cognition, and our cognition exists somewhat in the physical world and someone in the virtual world.

“We’re going to be talking more and more about the tether between our physical and our digital doppelgangers and the rights and the ability to charge rent on them.”

We’re going to be talking more and more about the tether between our physical and our digital doppelgangers and the rights and the ability to charge rent on them. They will also be taxed, whether through cloud computing or ads or late stage capitalism.

The pandemic has also made me really nervous about humanity’s ability to work on Big THings. The austerity we’re gonna need to survive climate change is astonishing, and yet you have the governor of Florida who told his citizens and his public servants it was illegal to talk about climate change. Now we’re seeing what happens when limestone erosion and sea air hits buildings.

The fact that this is something that we are unable to talk about as functional democracies terrifies me, and I would love it if I could say to you, “humans will come together and realize that unless they want to be extinct, they’re gonna have to change stuff,” but I’m not seeing any sign of that.

The Stegosaurus existed around 160 million years, T-Rex existed about 65 million years ago. That means T-Rex is closer to humans than it is to stegosaurus, despite what you may have seen in Jurassic Park. As a species goal, “let’s last as long as the dinosaurs” seems pretty basic. But we’ve been here for 300K years and we’ve almost burned the place down!

The next decade is going to be full of very difficult lessons. We’re going to have to tell people they can’t have things they want, and unfortunately we elect people who say what we want to hear, not what we need to do. That’s going to cause a significant collapse of some of the societies around the world. It’s going to cause untold poverty and disease. Enjoy your kiwis and avocados while you can, because we’re going to see massive disruption — and if the pandemic has shown me anything, it’s that we are completely unprepared for it.