Howard Rheingold: The "arms race" between participation and control

Early adopter says usefulness of crowdsourcing still unclear

Scott Rosenberg inteviews Howard Rheingold in person

I first met Howard Rheingold 15 years ago, when he was chronicling an earlier era of excitement about the possibilities of online communication and collaboration -- chiefly in his book, "The Virtual Community." Before that, Rheingold had written one of the first and still best accounts of the rise of personal computing ("Tools for Thought," 1986); in 2002 his prescient follow-up to the community book, "Smart Mobs," laid out much of the terrain that Web 2.0 pioneers would map over the following five years. (The earlier two books are both online in their entirety; there's an active blog and forum for "Smart Mobs.")

I visited Rheingold on May 8 at his home in Mill Valley, CA, where I found him in his tranquil, shady garden, a fountain bubbling quietly by his side and an Apple laptop perched on his knees.

Scott Rosenberg: The last time I interviewed you it was January 1994, before the Web had really taken off, soon after "The Virtual Community" had come out. At the end of that book you talked about us being at a crossroads -- there was a period of the next few years that would determine a lot of things. There was this period of the walled gardens vs. the Internet, and how were things going to shake out? You wrote, "The question is whether citizens will be able to communicate with each other, or solely through the mediation of whoever controls the channel." We got through that period, and we came out of it with an Internet that remains open.

A: That conflict has not gone away.

Q: Is it a cycle? Did it go away, only to return now?

A: It's not a cycle. It can easily be explained: AT&T wasn't aware then, but they are now. When I went around the world talking to research managers and executives at telecommunications companies about the Internet, and social communication, for what was to become the "Virtual Community" book, I vividly remember that they not only did not seem to be enthusiasts, but treated the idea of the Internet with contempt. It was "CB radio." They are certainly aware of it now. And gee whiz, didn't Judge Green dismember AT&T? But the pieces have reassembled themselves -- like which mythological figure?

Q: The Terminator?

A: AT&T now owns a significant part of the duopoly that provides broadband internet access, and they are fighting hard for the ability to turn off Net neutrality and turn on tiered access. I'd say it's just a matter of, it took a while for the giants to awaken.

But I think that interim was very important -- in that many hundreds of millions of people have had a taste of being able to publish their own or share their own. So it's going to be hard to put it back to the days of cable television. Although, gee, it sort of is cable television, isn't it? You get your Internet, your voice over IP, and your television for one not-so-low price.

Remember 1994, the big battles then: I went and testified for the ACLU v Reno over the Communications Decency Act. The Time cover on "cyberporn" -- the big societal discourse about this new medium was about porn. At the same time, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was being put together, some giant trillion-dollar deal that nobody understands -- except I do remember the cable and telephone companies saying it would open competition to many more, and that would necessarily be good for consumers because it would drive the prices down. I would like to ask people whether they think their cable prices have gone down and do they see more competition.

Back then they said, give us the license to print money, don't ask us too much about the details. Now they're saying, having printed money for ten years, we'd like to print more, because all of those services that were built by kids in dorm rooms have now created a huge source of revenue for us, and we'd like to have complete control over it, and eliminate the competition. So you can see it as one narrative.

That's only one of the prongs of the attack, of course -- the extension of copyright and the instantiation of copyright laws in hardware, this interlocking hardware and legal thing called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that makes strings of numbers illegal -- that's another attack by a different incumbent industry on the many-to-many-ness of the network.

Q: It sounds like you followed this recent story about Digg removing the DVD encryption code.

A: I joined the D9 06 -- whatever number it is -- group on Facebook.

Q: That's an example of a situation where the relative openness of the medium as it is today, on some level, empowered people to push back against a limit that they thought was unfair. Or wrong. In terms of what we were looking at in 1993-4, would you say that's a success -- that such a thing was able to happen in 2007?

It's an arms race. I wrote a little bit, trying to understand this. I'm driven, not by being a scholar, but by trying to understand what's happening with the technologies. So inevitably, when you ask the questions you're asking, it drives you to Foucault. He talks about knowledge, power -- he writes "knowledge/power" because he believes the two are so intimately connected -- and also power and counter-power. Centralized power, decentralized power, power of one faction vs. another faction -- those are in an arms race, and a coevolution, so it's not as if there's a victory. There's a constant vying. There's a process.

But I'd say that [during] this 10 years, there's [been] a huge opening and flowering of what humans do and what their tools enable them to do -- on a collective basis, but also lots and lots of individuals who didn't have that megaphone before. So there's this old narrative of the central controllers of the network wanting to put it back under control, and then there's the counter-narrative of all of the people who discovered they can publish a blog or take a picture of a world news event and send it to the Internet, or tell people there's a disease that the government isn't telling the world about that's killing pigs in China, or any of the things I wrote about 10 years later in "Smart Mobs."

Q: At the end of that book, you wrote, "The most important question is whether there really is a counterpower or whether it's yet another simulacrum."

A: Well, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, so I wouldn't be so quick to say that the revolution is won, or that the revolution is anything but another commodity that's being cleverly packaged and sold to us. In terms of what most people believe is happening in the world vs. the relatively small percentage of enthusiasts who even know what the DMCA is, the issue isn't settled yet. Langdon Winner would say that the technological regime -- the combination of the hardware, the software, the laws, the norms, the economic powers that be -- that hasn't really jelled yet, it hasn't solidified yet, it's still influence-able.

That's the part that gets me accused of being a utopian -- when I say that. There's been an industry, since we last talked, in academia, of writing about the cyber-utopian naivete of what I was writing about, technology-enabled collective action. So to a certain degree I have to temper that.

Q: Rereading a lot of your writing, I found that you're absolutely consistent over the years, balancing saying that there are opportunities and there are dangers.

A: A friend of mine did a parody of me: "There's a new power in the world, it's enabling us to do this -- YET, there's some evil lurking powers-that-be that want to get it!"

Q: So when you get labeled "cyber-utopian," are they just not reading those parts?

A: Well, for one thing, I've changed my mind -- isn't that what learning is about? For another thing, nobody was writing about it at all, so it was just a natural target.

Q: By changed your mind, are you referring to the revised edition of "Virtual Community," with the new chapter incorporating the Frankfurt School critique?

A: I think it's really not a matter of semantics or political correctness to use non-deterministic language when you're talking about technology. Technology doesn't "do" this or that, people using a tool do this or that. And I think removing the idea that humans have agency is something that favors those who already have power. Removing the idea that you and your buddy can do anything is a more important weapon than physical coercion if you're in control and you don't want anyone else to have it.

So I learned from the critics that you need to locate how you're talking about a technological effect in a confluence of social, political and technological factors. Which in a sense I guess the criticism pushed me over into the academic side, vs. the guys you see at all the Silicon Valley conferences, with their particular world view.

Just as when I tried to understand cooperation and collective action in "Smart Mobs," that led me to Elinor Ostrom's work on institutions for collective action, that pushed me more toward being libertarian in a lot of the things I think. I got a liberal arts education, so I go out and try to find out what the literature is, what the discourse is, and make up my mind for myself. And find out that people have been studying various aspects of these things, and there's more to it than you thought when you first encountered it. So that absolute consistency you noted, from where I sit now, it looks like, the more I've wondered about this stuff, and the more I was pushed to prove what I was saying by the critics, the more I was bothered by criticism, the more it dawned on me what was really happening.

Although, I think there's one fundamental premise to everything that I always feel this close to pushing the panic button on. Sherry Turkle wrote something in Forbes just a couple of days ago about the amount of disconnection in the media-using world today. I don't always agree with her but I think she's one of the most interesting technology critics. For one thing, she's at MIT, she's in the heart of the technology. It's not as if she's observing it from afar. For another thing, for all these years she's been a very persistent, systematic empirical observer -- she's spent part of every day looking at people doing these things.

And you can't help noticing -- I think you could have a good debate, with neither side slated to win going in, about whether we're really better off with Blackberrys and email and IMs and Twitter and continuous partial attention and never being away from work. Look at this. [He points to his Mac laptop.] Technology enables me to sit in my garden. If it didn't buy that for me, would I be so in love with it? I have a deep ambivalence that's grown in me.

My daughter -- the little girl in the story at the start of "Virtual Community" -- she works for Google now. She called me the other day. She said, "Daddy, if I don't do my email on my Blackberry in the shuttle on the way home from work I'll have 300 emails in the morning." I said, "Welcome to my world." It's a dream! It's turning into a nightmare! So I have a fundamental ambivalence about technology. But I also think it's totally empowering to me and to many others. It's all, as Ted Nelson would say, intertwingled.

Q: Assignment Zero is all about crowdsourcing. What does that word mean to you?

A: There's some interesting ambivalences about that. Again, if you go back to "The Virtual Community," I talk about having a virtual think tank at my disposal -- it wasn't just at my disposal, I had to feed it for it to feed me. And then, in "Smart Mobs," I talked about phones and the Internet enabling collective action that wasn't possible before. So now we have an infrastructure that enables people to elect to participate in enterprises in which tiny elective contributions can add up to large things -- Wikipedia, open source, or the search for Jim Gray, Mechanical Turk.

There are a lot of ways in which people do things for what Benkler is now calling "non-market incentives," non-market peer production. That makes it possible, if you have the right kind of incentive. So far the incentive seems to be a kind of agreement or ideological alignment. Though I would say there's a certain amount of altruism and community-seeking involved in things like Wikipedia, or participating in open source projects.

There's a mixture of motives, that's part of it, but the self-election part is key. I might not know much about anything except rhododendrons, but I can go to Wikipedia and nobody can stop me from editing the rhododendrons page, and nobody can tell me, you go edit the rhododendrons page. That's what I want to do. Same for contributing code. Well, self-election is as you know very economically efficient. You don't need a management hierarchy to coordinate it, but it's also something which people have to have a reason to want to do it. I'll get back to that. But when you begin applying it to things like journalism, or political action, I think the classic combination of the two is the Sinclair Broadcasting case.

Q: Remind us of that story.

A: During the election campaign [of 2004], Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns a lot of outlets, TV and radio, and whose owner is closely aligned with the Bush Administration, was going to air a documentary that was regarded by bloggers on the left as being terribly one-sided. So within hours they went out and found out who all of the sponsors were and who all of the people to contact at all the stations were, and dented their stock by 25% in a couple of days. And Sinclair withdrew that documentary.

So there's a politically motivated ad hoc organization around a crowdsourced combination of journalism and activism. You can do stories that way, too -- that's Jay Rosen's idea. And you can get people to do a lot of valuable things that some people can capitalize on.

I thought Trebor Scholz's blog post about what the MySpace Generation needs to know about working for free is a good cautionary tale. You know, there are a lot of people who maybe aren't aware that two people made billions of dollars on YouTube. And probably a lot of those people don't care, because -- and here, I think this is really important -- they contributed to YouTube, and therefore to the valuation of the owners, because they wanted to show their videos to their friends. They got something out of it. Others got a lot of money out of it. They got something out of it they couldn't have gotten otherwise.

Now of course there are a lot of other places that you can post your videos online. So there is a kind of social contract there, if you're aware that there's a social contract. I think informed consent is the issue: Do you really know that people are making money off your decisions? Does that apply to Page Rank? I'm not thinking that I'm making Google richer today -- I'm providing the best link I can for my readers, from my self-interest. That Larry Page figured out how to make an algorithm based on my decision and yours actually made the resource more valuable for all of us. And they were able to make private property out of it.

The, I think, extremely dangerously flawed Digital Maoism meme mistakes collective action for collectivism. The difference is precisely self-election vs. coercion.

Q: You're referring to Jaron Lanier's essay?

A: Yes. Also Andrew Keen and his "Cult of the Amateur." The Cato Institute. Talking about "commonists." Any economist ought to understand what a "commons" is and how it's distinguished from state-owned property and private property. Conflation of these things is dangerous, particularly when you're putting the name of someone who murdered millions of people into the equation. It's Godwin's Law in effect, in a way. If you're going to invoke a mass murderer then I think there ought to be a really serious argument for it.

So I think self-election, doing this in my self-interest, is an important ingredient in getting crowdsourcing to work, and why that kind of collective action is not collectivism, it has to be not coerced. I also think decentralized control is essential to it. There's not one person ordering everyone around. Although certainly there are people at the core of Wikipedia, at the core of Linux. But if they were trying to order people around I don't think they would get all that cooperation.

Q: It's leadership by example and by inspiration and maybe by coordinating, rather than by ordering.

A: I agree with Benkler that there's a third form of production along with the market and the firm, that's emerging around common-space peer production, and that we don't understand a great deal about it yet. I would not dismiss it. But neither do I think we really know whether you can do it with things other than producing code or a knowledge repository online. What can't you do with it? We don't really know yet.

Q: To me crowdsourcing is interesting as a term because of its relationship to "outsourcing" -- a term in manufacturing and the commercial world. We've taken this label from the world of business and transposed it into the new realm of "commons-based peer production." Does that drag the market back into the discussion? Something like Mechanical Turk really puts this into relief. Because it's innovative and shares a lot of traits with things like Wikipedia and Linux and such. But in another way it's just old-fashioned piece work: we're going to give you X amount for each piece, and that's the extent of our relationship -- I'm not your employer and I have no responsibility for you.

A: This brings us back to, is it really a community? Tonnies really started sociology by talking about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Our organic solidarity because we're neighbors or coreligionists or republicans, we are stockholders in a firm, or employees, we're cogs in an instrumentality. I think that same tension has a lot to do with arguments over the sacred. "Sacred" has taken on a lot of these religious symbolic meanings, but anthropologists might generalize sacred as meaning, those things that a group of people does for the sake of doing it, not for the sake of something else. Dancing, singing, whatever -- there's sacred dancing, singing, then there's making a package out of it and selling it as a commodity.

It's always important to keep in mind, what am I selling here? Is this something that I don't want to sell? Particularly when you're talking about this phenomnenon in which many people do it truly because they believe in creating a free encyclopedia for everyone on earth. Maybe it's not true that humans are only materialistic and self-interested and never altruistic. Maybe it's only true that when the barriers to altruism are above a certain height, people will only act in their self-interest. Maybe it's also true that there are ways like Page Rank to leverage self-interest into something that has a material value. So I think throughout this conversation we're hobbled by talking about new phenomena with languages and frameworks that come from the past. Necessarily, it's a "horseless carriage" discussion.

Q: So would you put the word "crowdsourcing" in that category?

A: Well, crowdsourcing is a name for something that's new. And the name is connected to the business world. So it's going to have that connotation. I'm going to bet that "crowdsourcing" is what most people know it as five years from now. And "non-market-incented commons-based peer production" is going to be for professors. Good marketing is engineering memes that really work. You can't argue with that.

Q: You had a somewhat analogous situation in naming "Smart Mobs." The word "mob" carries so much baggage -- a group of people who are angry and unruly and uncouth!

A: Unruly mob. Lynch mob. There was a certain amount of deliberation in that, in part based on the ten years of largely interesting conversation about, is it really a community? Community is a projective test; it's a nice-sounding word that means what you want it to mean. And in fact there's an anthropologist named George Hillary -- or was he a sociologist? I better not get that wrong! He came up with 95 definitions of community. But mobs, that has a little bit of an edge to it. And they're not smart. But it is a name for a phenomenon that works.

Q: Assignment Zero crowdsourced some questions for you. Here's one: "Today's Smart Mobs have moved beyond pillow-fights at Justin Herman Plaza. They're increasingly being used to get publicity for social change -- especially in Europe. Some of those mobs are violent, highly political, and could even be called revolutionary. How long will it be before the mobs are 'smart' rather than just mobs?"

A: He got it a little backwards in that there were political manifestations -- the battle of Seattle in 1999, the Philippines demonstrations in 2000, the Korean elections of 2001 -- prior to the "flash mob" being invented as kind of a frivolous social phenomenon. I think it's used for both. If you use the professorial language and talk about lowering barriers for ad hoc collective action, well, ad hoc collective action can be a pillow fight in Justin Herman Plaza, or it could be what happened in the Ukraine, and ended up losing. What happened in Beirut was pretty amazing: you had two opposing sides in the Middle East, of all places, having demonstrations with hundreds of thousands of people on subsequent days, and there wasn't any violence.

I met Bob Axelrod, author of "Evolution of Cooperation," and he gave me a koan, which is "Why? Why not?" Why not violence? My own experience, 2003, prior to the Iraq War demonstrations I went to: I called my daughter who was at school, and said, "You should really see this." She said, "Well, how will I meet you?" I said, "Just park and call me."

So I think rather than a mob in which you are dissolved in the anonymous crowd, you're surrounded by your social network. Everyone in those crowds knew the people around them. And I think that acts like, in a nuclear reactor, you have the carbon rods [that] keep too many of the neutrons from crashing into each other, it lowers the radioactivity, or the heat of the mob.

That isn't to say that such mobs couldn't be fascist or violent. And in fact have been. Some of the demonstrations around the anti-Mohammed cartoons used smart-mob technology and tactics and were violent. There was also the Miss World riots. There have been documented cases of violent activity around this. But again: collective action can be the humanitarian response to Katrina, or it can be -- riots.

Q: There's an interview for Assignment Zero in which Jimmie Wales makes a pretty provocative statement I wanted to throw out to you: "I reject a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of the ideas around swarm intelligence or the wisdom of crowds. I think some of that stuff is pretty sketchy. I think it comes down to a really passionate person with a good mind who is committed to doing good work and doing that in collaboration with other people of similar minds. It remains an individual activity even when we do it in a group. And I think there's a lot of mystical talk about how there's some high mind or cloud of intelligence out there. I think that's confusing and sketchy rhetoric."

A: I think he's responding specifically to Digital Maoism, that says, I think unfairly, that this is the dissolution of the individual author into an anonymous crowd. In fact, if you're really a Wikipedian, it ain't an anonymous crowd, it's a community. They know who you are, and a lot of what you're doing is a performance for them -- as any kind of ongoing community is. In another sense, you're looking at the same thing through different ends of the telescope.

I think I can explain this in sociology terms. Sociology has theories of collective action. And one of the fundamental assumptions, or the common wisdom about collective action, is what Mancur Olson wrote in the 1960s, his study of the logic of collective action -- which is that public goods are not easily created by groups of people who don't know each other. The incentives and the coordination costs mount up and people ain't gonna do that.

Obviously something has changed in collective action theory because we're creating things like Wikipedia. There's a sociologist by the name of Bruce Bimber who said, we need to reconceptualize something as sociologists, and I believe it has to do with where we locate as individuals the boundary between private and public. That immediately made sense to me.

I'm a big user of Delicious. I need to stash my bookmarks, and I need to assign tags to them so I can find them. That's why I do it. However, by making that private act public, I not only contribute to creating a public good, I surface a lot of people whose own collections of private bookmarks become useful to me, because we have a shared interest. In fact it becomes a social network, a kind of knowledge community phenomenon there. So it's like the light and the shadow, one doesn't really exist without the other. If I didn't have that individual need, I wouldn't be contributing to this public good. If I didn't choose, and the software didn't make it easy for me to make that a public act, then that public good wouldn't exist.

I think to the degree that we're beginning to understand how these things work, you need that individual motivation, but you also need some way of aggregating those individual actions into something that's greater than the sum of its parts. So Wikipedia is not a collection of individual edits. There is a process by which those individual edits build. The question of course is whether they're building monotonically toward higher quality or whether it's going to deteriorate monotonically -- or whether there will just be untrustworthiness because there's an unpredictable amount of noise in the system. We don't know that. But there is a combination of individual expertise and authorship and some kind of social contract, collective process, community involved.

I do think there's a lot of magical thinking around collective intelligence, swarm intelligence, wisdom of crowds. Again, that's what science is for. Let's find out by observation and experiment what the limits and the capabilities of these phenomena really are.

Q: In "The Virtual Community" you wrote about the difficulty of consensus decision making -- how, online, the natural flow of conversation is into smaller and smaller arguments and points, and that's great for discussion, not great for decision-making. Has anything changed there? Is it that the structure has evolved, in something like Wikipedia, to the point that the process is able to more effectively reach, if not a final conclusion, at least a stable state?

A: I think there's been a coevolution of tools and social norms. The "neutral point of view" is a social norm. The talk pages, there's really a set of procedures for questioning the validity of things and arguing about that. Whether that governance mechanism works or is gameable by an inner circle is another uncertainty. But there's a number of social practices, there's also technology affordances. You can adopt a page, and when it's edited, you'll get pinged. And you can go look at that edit and revert it. Those social practices wouldn't happen without the ping, and the revision history, and the one-click revert.

What really interests me is this combination, this ecology of technology and social practice.

(Edited by Hope Tinney)