Photo by Ameer Basheer on Unsplash

Takeaways from Distroid Issue 19 — Howard Rheingold on Predicting Technology’s Future

Theme: Foresighting

For Distroid Issue 19, my takeaways focus on three themes:

1. Digital Organizing,
2. Regenerative Finance, and
3. Foresighting.

This post covers the Foresighting theme.

Foresighting

Foresighting is the ability to anticipate the future.

For Foresighting, I focused on Howard Rheingold on Predicting Technology’s Future by Untangling the Web (host is Noshir Contractor).

Howard Rheingold on Predicting Technology’s Future

Notes

I really like how Howard Rheingold has been driven by his curiosity and enthusiasm to learn and use these new computing tools, while remaining critical of their effects (moral, ethical, social, etc.) on society.

I especially liked his point that humanity can now develop super powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, but we have not truly spent the time to understand the societal implications of using such technologies.

Howard Rheingold’s ability to perceive signals is pretty interesting. It feels like he let his curiosity take him to the places he needed to be (or to the frontier), then examined the people (not necessarily the technology) at this frontier, to conclude whether such technology would have a transformational impact on society. A similar thing in the modern day would be to find key stakeholders at the frontier online on Twitter and follow their analyses.

Howard Rheingold makes a salient point regarding new mediums. Specifically, that we need to be cognizant of how we use these new mediums, such as social media, and learning the literacies to do so.

Howard Rheingold makes a very important mention that humanity’s biggest problems center around voluntary cooperation or coordination failure. We see coordination failure in areas like climate change and nuclear weapons.

I really liked how Howard Rheingold mentioned how to cultivate social capital online, and how we use norms to help deal with coordination issues.

Lastly, I always got to appreciate any mention of Douglas Engelbart.

Quiz

You can find the quiz here.

Additional Readings

1. What Juan Cambeiro Learned Forecasting Interest Rates, Tokyo Olympics, and COVID
2. Future Today Institute’s 2022 Tech and Science Trends Report
3. How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

Highlights

1. I found my way to Xerox PARC because I heard that you could edit writing on a television-like screen with a computer.
2. I found an article in the 1977 Scientific American titled “Microelectronics and the Personal Computer” by Alan Kay, and it had images of what he called a Dynabook of the future, pretty much an iPad. I called and asked if there was any writing jobs that they needed at PARC. Eventually, I got the job of roaming around and finding interesting people and writing about them, and then the Xerox PR department would place it in magazines. I drove half an hour from my home in San Francisco every day so that I could work on their computer there.
3. My research tools were a typewriter, a telephone, and a library card. I was interested in extending those capabilities. And then I met Doug Engelbart. Engelbart was talking about using the computer to extend human cognitive capabilities — augmentation, he called it. I’m interested in the intersection of technology and the mind.
4. I discovered that this diverse group of people I could connect with through a computer, not because we knew each other, but because we had similar interests, could really serve as an online think tank for me and help amplify my ability to learn about the things that I was writing about. So I became interested professionally with this as a tool, but also as a writer, I became interested in where is this all leading? What is this all doing to us as individuals and as communities and societies?
5. And because I wrote enthusiastically back then, a lot of people since then have set me up as kind of a straw man utopian. But in fact, if you read the last chapter of my book The Virtual Community, it’s called Disinformocracy. I’ve been writing about what might go wrong as well for a long time. And I think it’s important to have a nuanced view of technology, that it’s okay for someone who’s critical to also be enthusiastic.
6. I thought, here is something very important happening. People recognize something important is happening. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they knew what Xerox PARC was doing. They adopted it. I thought it was very important because this was our consciousness and our capacity to think and communicate meeting our ability to build technologies that are very powerful. And you know, one thing that I think we the human race noticed from the nuclear physicists and the bomb was that human ability to create powerful technology seems to be racing ahead of our ability to know what to do with them morally and ethically.
7. I was saying, the computer, the telephone and the network are merging into a new medium. We don’t really have a name for it yet. Well, now we call it the smartphone. But that ability, I thought, would signal another kind of phase change in the world in which people were able to organize collective action in the physical world through their connection online.
8. Because I was teaching about social media, you know, it only made sense that we use that social media in the process of doing. I ended up creating a course called Social Media Issues around my book Net Smart. My answer to Is this any good for us? has been, it depends on what people know, that it’s no longer a matter of hardware or software or regulation or policy, it has to do with who knows how to use this medium well. And I felt that if you mastered these five fundamental literacies or fluencies, that you would do better.
9. Yeah. So what are these five essential literacies? Attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network awareness. I start with attention. The bad news is that the business model of the web has to do with attracting and engaging and maintaining your attention so that they can sell you things. And the people who are engineering these apps are very good at doing that, and we’re all suckers. The good news is that there’s ample evidence both from millennia-old contemplative traditions and from neuroscience that you can begin to understand how to deploy your attention more productively, something called metacognition. So one of the things I taught my students was, you know, becoming aware of where you put your attention is important.
10. And then the next one was participation. And we really wouldn’t be having this conversation about the web if it wasn’t for participation. It was created by millions of people who put up websites and put up links to other websites. From the Google twins to Mark Zuckerberg, people invent things in their dorm rooms, and it changes the world. And part of that is the miracle of the architecture of the internet. You don’t have to get permission to start a new search engine or social network, as long as it operates according to the technical protocols of the internet. You just need people to come to your website.
11. So when I wrote Smart Mobs, I became interested in dynamics of collective action. How humans cooperate and what the barriers to cooperation are is probably at the root of our most significant global problems, from climate change to nuclear weapons to interstate conflict to land management. Elinor Ostrom won her Nobel Prize because she came up with design principles that if a group that was managing a scarce resource used these design principles, they would succeed.
12. It was pretty obvious even back in The WELL. You got a group of people together, you could solve problems together online. Going back to Engelbart. Engelbart was not primarily interested in hardware and software. He was interested in, — and he used these words, “increasing the collective intelligence of organizations,” collective IQ, he called it.
13. The person you buy coffee from, the stranger you see when you’re walking your dog, the people you communicate with online, those are your network. They don’t all know each other. In a community, people know each other. Way back when Marc Smith told me about knowledge capital, social capital, and communion, one of the things that I taught my students was how social capital is cultivated and harvested online. The traditional definition of social capital is the ability of groups of people to get things done together outside of formal mechanisms like laws, governments, corporations, and contracts.
14. I learned, if somebody has a question and I have the answer, even if I don’t know that person, doesn’t cost me anything to give them the answer. Well, if you get several hundred people together who have different kinds of expertise and they all do that, suddenly, everybody is empowered. But you know what, people aren’t gonna give you answers unless you give answers yourself. I think anybody who is in a support group online knows about that.
15. Oh, that’s right. When you study human cooperation, what’s called altruistic punishment is a big part of that. It’s not just laws that enable people to live together, it’s norms. Why do you get angry when someone cuts ahead of you in line? It’s because they’re breaking the norm, and you feel that you need to enforce that.
16. I think the most important one is the disintegration of consensus about what’s real and what’s not. Misinformation seems to travel much faster than corrections. The anti-vax movement worldwide is a good example.
17. I don’t think people are gonna want to have avatar meetings and buy avatar groceries and socialize to the degree that the Metaverse vision from Facebook is promulgating. I just don’t think it’s going to appeal to everybody that way. I also think that there’s some problems. In Second Life, there were what were called griefers. You would be having a seminar and a bunch of flying penises would disrupt it. I think we’re going to see that kind of disruption in the Metaverse, and we’ve seen that Facebook has been unable to moderate even in its two-dimensional form.

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