One Zero One: Nico Macdonald, 50 Years of the Internet Project

In our latest episode of the One Zero One Podcast, we had an interesting discussion with Nico Macdonald, Educator, Facilitator and Consultant, around his ’50 years of the internet project’.

Nico Macdonald is currently a Tutor at CIEE London Global Institute and Tutor/Visiting Fellow at London Southbank University. He aims to combine being an educator, teaching subjects around creative industries and digital media, and also initiating his own projects around areas he thinks is important to understand better. One of the projects he is looking at is the next 50 years of the internet, which is the basis of this podcast episode.

The project started by taking the past 50 years as a ‘living lab’ or massive ‘data pool’ of information which enables us to create an understanding of how large scale socio-technical change takes place, and how we can accelerate that in the future. Nico highlighted that we need to focus on sociotechnical change as it is critical to the future of humanity.

The Research

During the project, Nico is trying to invert the model of traditional research which is typically formed of large amounts of primary and secondary research over a long period of time, and then trying to analyse all of the data to pull out the themes, trends and insights. Inverting the research Nico invites people to contribute by telling stories about how they have used ICT internet technologies to somehow transform what they do in their personal, social, work or political life. It wouldn’t take much reflection for people to think about an area of their life, that if they went back 10–20 years you did it in a completely different way because of the difference in technology.

Are we still early on in our experience with the internet?

Nico believes we are, whilst many people think that the internet is relatively new, we imagine there’s been a huge rate of change and ‘disruption’ because so much has happened in such little time. However, if you look over a period of 50 years, things have changed relatively slowly. If you go back even further its been a change that’s been very slow, and at the same time the foundation of ideas that we’re now rolling out are actually 70 years old. Therefore we need to make sure the foundation of ideas for the next 70 years is being put in place now, even if it’s hard to see what they might be.

Technology gets invented for limited purposes as mankind is an experimental species that are restless and never satisfied. We see the new possibilities of these things and extending what it can do. While the internet was originally set out to share knowledge and tools to process data, it is now being used in fundamental ways. For example in manufacturing everything from new forms of making, automating assembly lines, new real-time inventory and logistics and supply chain.

Viewing code as a beautiful thing

Culturally we have a lack of intrigue about how things work and we shouldn’t because it is a signal that we are not in a making/experimental culture, but in a consuming culture. We view architecture, fashion, typography as beautiful things, but code never gets viewed in the same way. People create forms for ICT which are meaningful and masterful which releases the power of technology, but if cultural commentators don’t have a way of talking and understanding them then it shows we are not engaged with the challenges of creating ICT as a future.

How do people get involved?

Go to spyco.uk, the project is pinned on the homepage and the manifestos on the project are also there. Nico wants to engage people who understand sociotechnical change, history, information, visualisation, storytelling and data science. The project is open-ended, Nico has something he wants to understand and everything else is up for grabs.

You can listen to the full podcast here where Nico gives examples and more detail around each of the areas we’ve explored above.

You can find out more, Stream and download any of Version 1’s One Zero One Podcast episodes from our website or any of your favourite streaming platforms.