Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 37

Ritson bets on a media theorist over Facebook or Goldman

A fellow journalist and professor steps out of the Facebook cloud to see what is happening. I hope I meet this guy.

All that glitters isn't social media gold
Marketing Week
13 January 2011 | By Mark Ritson

There have been times over the past seven days when it seemed every major business story was pointing to exactly the same brand. A global hoax spread across social networks that falsely claimed one of the biggest online brands was about to be pulled by its disillusioned founder. Even the entertainment news was affected when the National Critics Awards in America favoured the movie The Social Network, with four major prizes on Sunday evening.

It was Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.

But among all the media hype and billion dollar figures being bandied around last week there was a solitary voice of dissension. Douglas Rushkoff may not have as high a profile now as when he emerged as one of the late 20th century's smartest media theorists 20 years ago, but for many of us who were in long trousers way before Mark Zuckerberg was even born, Rushkoff remains a prescient critic of media trends.

It was Rushkoff who anticipated the era of cyberculture ten years before it arrived. He coined the terms "viral media" and "social currency". He was also bang on the money in predicting the decline of first Netscape and later the newly merged AOL Time Warner. And it is Rushkoff who is now distinctly suspicious of the long-term viability of Facebook.

In an article for CNN earlier this week, he was in no mood for equivocation. He believes Facebook's current success will be short lived. Rushkoff argues: "We are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren't the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out."

What can he mean? Surely Facebook is about to become one of the world's biggest brands? That's certainly been the message from a stream of identikit investment bankers who have appeared across the national news networks over the past week to explain Facebook's imminent global domination.

It has, after all, become the biggest single provider of display advertising in the UK with mega-advertisers like Procter & Gamble paying millions to advertise their brands using its pages. And if the rumours are true, Facebook generated £260m in profits for 2010 and has an even rosier outlook for the year ahead. Perhaps best of all, banking behemoth Goldman Sachs is trying to find a way to allow billionaire investors to take a $1.5bn share of the company – a deal that values Facebook at $50bn.

Don't just count the money, follow it to the source. Businesses run on customers, not sales
So where is Rushkoff coming from? Let's ignore the enthusiasm of Goldman Sachs to encourage its clients to invest billions of dollars in Facebook. Goldman is a brand that long ago sold its soul, its client based integrity and its once sacred 14 principles in order to make as much money as possible. That, at least, was the conclusion of the US government last year when it fined Goldman $0.5bn for selling collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) to its clients during the credit crisis while simultaneously shorting the very same investments for its own profit.

Goldman's investment vehicle and its $50bn valuation of the brand should not be deemed as evidence of Facebook's long-term prospects, but rather the bank's short-term interest in making money irrespective of the investment in question.

But surely there is still no denying Facebook's long-term business potential? It is here where Rushkoff differs from the bankers and investment analysts. The latter simply count money, but Rushkoff looks to the place where the revenues originate. Don't just count the money, follow it to the source. Businesses run on customers, not sales. And Rushkoff believes that Facebook is building its business from a fundamentally unsustainable base.

It's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won
Social media, as Rushkoff sees it, is just as temporary and fleeting as a nightclub or a party. At some point the movers and shakers are going to do just that and when they do everyone else eventually follows.

And the frightening speed with which the likes of Friendster and MySpace lost their lustre illustrates the paradox of making a long-term investment in any social media brand. The scare over the weekend that Facebook was going to close itself down in March, and the thousands of stories and tweets that erupted as a result, illustrate just how mercurial and transitory social media brands actually are.

Marketing Week, like every major media outlet, praised the savvy acquisition of MySpace by News International for £375m. Half a decade on the deal looks not only mistaken, but utterly devoid of any value whatsoever. And Facebook may be next. "It's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won," according to Rushkoff. "It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order."

Who knows what we will be saying about Facebook five years from now. But if I had to believe anyone, my money wouldn't be with Goldman Sachs. It would be on the media theorist who, so far, has an uncomfortable tendency of proving to be right.

Mark Ritson is an associate professor of marketing, an award winning columnist, and a consultant to some of the world's biggest brands

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Published on January 13, 2011 05:45

Interview with RawIllumination

By Tom Jackson, at rawillumination.blogspot.com/2011/01/few-questions-for-douglas-rushkoff.html

Douglas Rushkoff's Wikipedia biography states that "Rushkoff worked with both Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary on developing philosophical systems to explain consciousness, its interaction with technology, and social evolution of the human species, and references both consistently in his work." Rushkoff has been an instructor at the Maybe Logic Academy.

While I am not enough of an expert on Mr. Rushkoff to intelligently discuss all of his intellectual influences, and how his insights related to Robert Anton Wilson's, I feel comfortable making a couple of assertions: (1) Fans of RAW will enjoy listening to Mr. Rushkoff, too and (2) Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age is a really good book. (It's also a physically beautiful little book, making a nice argument for old-fashioned book production in a digital age.)

Rushkoff has been described as a "media theorist," but a number of other labels could be applied. A sentence from the official biography: "Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values."

Reading the biography makes me feel like a hopeless underachiever, but here's another couple of sentences: "Rushkoff is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University's New Media Program. He has taught regularly for the MaybeLogic Academy, NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the Esalen Institute. He also lectures about media, art, society, and change at conferences and universities around the world." There's also information about his articles that appear all over the place, his PBS documentaries, his graphic novels, and so on.

Despite his busy schedule, Rushkoff immediately agreed when in the wake of finishing his new book, I asked if I could pose a few questions.

Program or Be Programmed is a slim book, but I thought you packed a lot into it. I had the impression when I read it that it synthesizes years of thought, reading other books about the Internet and personal experience using technology. Was that how it felt to you writing it?
Yeah. Each sentence could be a paragraph, each paragraph a chapter, and each chapter a whole book. It's twenty-five years of thinking about interactive media in there. I haven't really written a book explicitly about digital technology and the net before, even though it's the field of study I'm best known for. So I had hundreds of articles and talks worth of material and collected insights to share.

The trick was doing it in a way that made sense to people immediately – especially to people who are used to engaging with ideas through Twitter feeds. There's no time to make an argument. I had to write sentences that functioned one way while being read and then unpacked themselves later in the reader's brain.

I definitely felt like I was on solid ground throughout, though. I've thought about these issues so much, and tested my conclusions over a course of years, heard the counter-arguments, and had time to refine my thinking. So of everything I've written, it's the most cured, smoothed out, and densely packed.

I agree completely with your first command, "Do Not Be Always On," but it isn't always easy to follow. This morning, for example, I made a conscious decision to read the first chapter of a novel I wanted to start before I turned on the laptop to check my email. Have you trained yourself not to be always on, or is it still a struggle sometimes?

Well, just the fact that it's only a struggle *sometimes* means we're not always on, right? I still struggle with the incoming flow of media and messaging, absolutely. I have over 3000 unanswered emails in my inbox right now. It varies from about 1000 to 5000 at any given moment. I used to get really anxious about it, and now I just dig through what I can and then go off and do something I actually want or need to.

The bias of the medium makes the incoming messages seem more important than whatever we were doing. But just because something is pinging at us does not mean we have to look at it. It's a real-time thing, anyway – that's the whole point of the chapter you're referring to. It's not a living breathing human being on the other end of a phone line, it's a message.

One of my favorite sentences in your book is "I've only used one name on the Internet: Rushkoff." I try to post under a clear identity, and I hate it when I'm attacked anonymously attacked.

My newspaper finally began making people register before posting online. Before we did that, I noticed there was a split in the building on what people thought of the comments. The editors liked making it easy to comment, because they wanted pageviews, but the reporters hated it, because people didn't want to talk to us. Our sources were afraid of being attacked online. Have you noticed similar situations at other places?

Yeah, sure. The short-term needs of the market are always what bring down the quality of something. On the net, that effect is amplified. Publications want hit counts by any means necessary – but instead of just getting stupid readers, the stupid readers are actually contributors to the publication. Those comments fields are still under the masthead. They create the culture of the publication.

So a lot of places are realizing that registration is a good idea – plus they can leverage more when they know more. Advertisers love that user data, don't forget.

But yeah – this notion that we have to leave comments on to all comers no matter what just yields the angriest and least informed crap. There's nothing wrong with making people say who they are. If they're in real danger of being killed for speaking the truth, we can make exceptions. But it's not the rule.

Another of your commands is "Share, Don't Steal." What do you do, if anything, about people trying to steal your work and distribute it on the Internet? Have you ever felt any temptation to release any of your books under Creative Commons, the way Cory Doctorow does?

I've distributed a lot of stuff under Creative Commons. Three books, and a bunch of essays. Sometimes it's practical and great, but I don't see it as a requirement. I love the freedom to use Creative Commons.

On the other hand, my book Life Inc sold maybe 25,000 copies in hardcover, yet was downloaded 250,000 times as a torrent. That's pretty nuts. I'm glad a lot of people got to read it, but it feels like a whole lot of people and search engines and torrent sites extracted value out of something I did.

As I pointed out on my RAW blog, Robert Anton Wilson forecast First Amendment struggles on the Internet long before they really became an issue. What do you think he would make of the current controversy over Wikileaks?

He'd love it, but less from some constitutional perspective than that the whole story throws things out of balance. It makes people question the security of information, the power of government, the ability of the counterculture. It is cognitively destabilizing. That's all RAW was after, I think. So he'd be pleased.

When people describe you as an intellectual heir to Robert Anton Wilson, do you find it flattering, irritating, or a little of both?

Only flattering. Inspiring, really.

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Published on January 10, 2011 09:41

Facebook hype will fade

I have a piece on CNN.com today arguing that Facebook's days are numbered.

(CNN) — All signs for Facebook appear to be pointing up.

Mark Zuckerberg is Time's Man of the Year, the movie about him seems likely to be an Oscar winner, and now Goldman Sachs is raising $1.5 billion from its favorite investors on behalf of the social networking company.

At the very same moment, Facebook's only real competitor –NewsCorps' waning social networking site, MySpace — is shedding employees and expenses, most likely in hopes of a fire sale.

But appearances can be deceiving. In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren't the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.

Indeed, 11 years ago this week, when AOL announced its $350 billion merger with Time Warner, I was asked to write an OpEd for the New York Times explaining what the deal between old and new media companies really meant. I said that AOL was cashing in its over-valued dotcom stock in order to purchase a stake in a "real" media company with movie studios, theme parks and even cable. In short, the deal meant AOL knew their reign was over.

The Times didn't run the piece. Of course, the merger turned out to be a disaster: AOL's revenue stream was reduced to a trickle as net users ventured out onto the Web directly.

Likewise, Rupert Murdoch's 2005 purchase of MySpace for $580 million coincided pretty much exactly with the website's peak of popularity. People blamed corporate ownership for the social network's demise, but the cycle had already begun.

Now, it's Facebook's turn. This week's news that Goldman Sachs has chosen to invest in Facebook while entreating others to do the same should inspire about as much confidence as their investment in mortgage securities did in 2008. For those who weren't watching, that's when Goldman got rich betting against the investments it was selling.

This time, Goldman is putting up some millions of its own — as if this skin in the game means they couldn't be up to their old tricks. But the commissions and underwriting fees Goldman is earning for selling that other $1.5 billion of private Facebook shares could be enough to offset the cost of their own investment. And bets against Facebook could be leveraged any number of times.

These are the kinds of points those of us who lived through the AOL-Time Warner merger, the MySpace deal and the rest of the dotcom and real estate crashes now raise about such deals. These are also precisely the kinds of points that don't get addressed under the new, privatized and utterly opaque scheme Goldman has devised on behalf of its client, Facebook.

Unlike a public offering of shares, this private offering to Goldman's clients doesn't obligate Facebook to come clean on its real profits. It doesn't have to submit to standard accounting practice, or indicate how well it's really doing or isn't doing. It gets to remain in the safe cloud of hype that protects all such ventures until they either make a real profit or die trying.

The object of the game, for any one of these ultimately temporary social networks, is to create the illusion that it is different, permanent, invincible and too big to fail. And to be sure, Facebook has gone about as far as any of them has at creating that illusion.

If you were there for Compuserve, AOL, Tripod, Friendster, Orkut, MySpace or LinkedIn, you might have believed the same thing about any one of those social networks. Remember when those CD Roms from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.

Further confirming that the hype and market has reached its peak, social networking competitor LinkedIn is maneuvering toward its own IPO, which it likely hopes to complete before Facebook eventually gets there and poisons the well. These companies are being valued as if they will be our permanent means for identifying ourselves.

Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them. (Facebook's successor will no doubt provide an easy "migration utility" through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.)

We will move on, just as we did from the chat rooms of AOL, without even looking back. When the place is as ethereal as a website, our allegiance is much more abstract than it is to a local pub or gym. We don't live there, we don't know the owner, and we are all the more ready to be incensed by the latest change to a privacy policy, or to learn that every one of our social connections has been sold to the highest corporate bidder.

So it's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.

The longer the company can maintain the illusion of great profits without alienating its user base, the longer they can delay the inevitable decline. But given that Facebook has already begun cashing in its chips, that moment has quite likely arrived.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Douglas Rushkoff.

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Published on January 07, 2011 10:55

Why Marketing Threatens the True Promise of Social Media

I just wrote this for Mashable:

Social media is everywhere, and finally accepted as much as, well, as much as the Internet itself. Sadly, though, in reaching this level of ubiquity, we have ended up surrendering the real promise of this medium.

I fought for so many years to convince people that the Net was a social medium in the first place. Until recently, everybody seemed to believe that "content is king," and that all this messy socializing between people was of little value. It was all about getting people onto a sticky website so they'd make purchases. Their conversations and innermost thoughts were once considered utterly un-monetizable.

But thanks to Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, social media has arrived as a justifiable expense for businesses looking to do whatever it is that's intended to replace advertising. And as a result, people who should know better -– many of us who have some understanding of how social media actually works –- are busy working for companies who want to turn this social landscape back into a marketplace.

This isn't about pointing fingers or laying blame. It's about stopping ourselves before it is too late. We still have a chance for social media to generate the biggest change in how culture and commerce operate since the invention of the printing press. But it will require that we recognize what is so special about it, how it disrupts the status quo, and why it'd be such a shame to give all this up without a fight.

A Historic Opportunity
The most disruptive feature of social media is that it allows us to connect with one another relatively directly. (Even Facebook's architecture of central servers is completely unnecessary for social networking to occur, as new tools like Diaspora are quickly demonstrating.) The direct connection via media –- for socializing, or even for commerce — has been controlled by both governments and businesses for the past 600 years. That's right: This is our best opportunity in six centuries to connect with our peers via technology without the oversight of powerful interests.

more…

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Published on January 06, 2011 09:42

Program or Be Programmed on Frontline Digital Nation

The PBS Frontline Digital Nation project really did inspire my most recent book, Program or Be Programmed. In these (admittedly bad-hair-day) video clips, I explain the connection between the two – as well the rationale behind my call to integrate some programming into our school curriculums.

More here.

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Published on January 05, 2011 12:59

Life Inc Resource Guide

To celebrate the paperback release of Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back, I assembled a guide to resources and organizations who exemplify the post-corporate strategies for commerce and community. But since so many people already purchased the hardcover, I didn't want to penalize them, so I've put the resource guide up here for anyone to use.

Here's the beginning of my introduction to the guide.

But Wait: There's More
The Life Inc Guide to Reclaiming the Value You Create

Yes, there's hope. A lot of it. The economic crisis has laid bare a lot of what's wrong about the way we work and live. Many people are recognizing that we are running our society on obsolete software – legacy systems of money, government, and commerce that are simply incompatible with the modern, post-colonial world.

But it's hard for people to see past these obsolete systems, or that there's any option besides restoring them. It's hard to imagine how to start a business without a loan, how to get goods and services without dollars, how to work without finding a company to offer employment, or how to invest or save without banks or the stock market. We are so used to working through corporate institutions, we have trouble imagining alternatives for any of our activities.

It's not that we have to get rid of corporations or stop working through them entirely, however. They are great for making smart phones, building bridges, shipping crude oil, or developing medical devices. But they're less effective on the local level, when people might actually be able to serve one another's needs more efficiently, and in ways that encourage transaction, sustainability, and meaningful employment.

After finishing this book, I visited Lansing, Michigan, devastated by the collapse of GM. Most people I spoke with wanted to know how they could convince GM to re-open a plant, or a big bank to invest cash in their town. Until then, they believed, they were all out of work. Under the false assumption that money creates jobs (instead of the other way around) they were looking for an external injection to kickstart their economy – even though it would ultimately result in a further extraction of value from their community.

What most of people I engaged with over this past year couldn't fully grasp was that they already had all the necessary components for an economy: people with needs, and people with skills. Even land. All they were lacking was a means of exchanging the value that they could create for one another. There was plenty of work – just no cash in circulation with which to keep track of who was doing what for whom. All they needed to do was develop a simple alternative currency or barter system and they'd be back in business.

I realize that this suggestion sounds romantic – even old fashioned. It may seem as if I'm suggesting we return to the Middle Ages, the last time our economy was characterized by peer-to-peer exchange. All I'm actually proposing is that we reinstate a few of the simple social and business practices that were made illegal back then. We don't stop using corporations; we merely re-introduce some other means of getting things done. Just as choosing to walk to work doesn't mean you have to get rid of your car, choosing to work and exchange with other people on a peer-to-peer basis doesn't mean eliminating all corporations from the landscape. We can co-exist with them, each offering the other support and a backup plan. Corporations can come through with technology and infrastructure that support local business, while thriving local commerce provides and alternative source of employment and stability when corporations go out of business, as they did in Lansing.

Some readers, in less dire straits but just as committed to taking back the world from corporatism, felt daunted by how few specific suggestions I made for taking back the world. Joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) group sounds, well, just too easy to fix any big problem, and too inconvenient to bother with. Or a babysitting club? Like that's going to take back the world?

I believe it can. And, more importantly, you can.

In the opening chapter of the book, we looked at how each compromise we make to corporatism leads to further compromises. Choosing to purchase her prescriptions at Wal-Mart over the local pharmacy led one mother to stop attending Parent-Teacher Association meetings, for fear of running into her former druggist's wife. When public schools get worse, too many community members think they need to go it alone, and spend their time and energy trying to earn more money to pay for private school when they could be joining with other parents to make the public system better – from the bottom up. Decisions made under the fearful, self-interested presumption of corporatism reinforce one another in a negative feedback loop.

Likewise, each tiny choice we make to take back our world leads to a long chain of positive effects. Start a babysitting club and you form closer relationships with neighbors, you get more quality time with your spouse, you learn about your neighbors' kids and give your own kids more role models. You build a support system, a community, a network of friends, opportunities for employment, and you help to counter the isolation intentionally built in to the suburban landscape. Join a CSA and you take back your nutrition from Big Agra, reduce your dependence on trucking and oil, challenge the artificial efficiencies of fast food, force reconsideration of zoning laws, and support organic practices – making them cheaper and more competitive in the process. Yes, little ideas and little choices are what matter – especially in a world where the big ones are the province of brands, lobbies, and other highly abstracted and centralized entities.

A young reporter for a major news magazine interviewed me about this book shortly after it came out. She couldn't understand how such big problems could be solved without similarly "big ideas" – as if one kind of problem demanded an equally sized solution. But real people don't engage with the world via big ideas. We engage through activities that are scaled to real life. Big ideas – at least the kind we recognize as big ideas – are for big entities: corporations, countries, continents. If we're going to begin operating on a human scale at least some of the time, then we must abandon the one-size-fits-all way of doing things. That's just another artifact of the Industrial Age, and its bias towards highly mechanized, repeatable, manufacturing.

By enacting small ideas, often on a local level, we reconnect with the innate power we have as living, human beings. We reify the dignity of this scale of existence, and begin to experience the world from the perspective of people rather than that of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Plus, we regain our home field advantage against corporate players that have yet to fully incarnate.

There are as many ways of engaging with the real world as there are real people – and just as many ways of creating and exchanging value, too. The rulebook that works for one group in one region may not work for another. Besides – there's no need for us all to approach commerce and community the same way. That's a logic borrowed from corporatism, in which a single company wants to sell lots of the same thing to everyone. In the real world – the one we are restoring – people exchange ideas and models with one another, to use how they please.

So let's spread some of these ideas right here. In order to demonstrate just how accessible so many of these first steps are – as well as to give you some real and ready resources to begin – I have asked some people and organizations who are already taking back the world to share their strategies with you.

Some of the steps we can take to reclaim our world from corporatism may sound crunchy and lefty, while others might sound right wing or crassly commercial. I encourage you to read with an open mind, paying less attention to the style of each business or organization, and more to the way its founders solved problems, envisioned solutions, and drew support from other people rather than forming dependencies on banks and other corporations. These are each sustainable enterprises, built from the bottom up to answer real needs, employ real people, and contribute to making the world a better place.

And you could be doing any one of them.

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Published on January 05, 2011 09:29

Back to the Bazaar

Just wrote this piece for a magazine called One+ about why it's important to bring commerce into culture. It's written for events planners (I'm actually going to be one, myself, very shortly – more on that later) but the logic applies to pretty much any community.

While we may all have our varying feelings about the value of corporations and big business in our lives, commerce itself is not to blame for the host of ills attending modern times. Commerce is good – or at the very least an appropriate way to engage with one another at this stage of human evolution. We aren't living Star Trek just yet.

This piece explains how the bazaar was a p2p marketplace not just for products but for ideas. To avoid all forms of commerce at a meeting – or in an overly planned community – leads to an unfortunate sterility that only forces greater dependence on corporatism.

THE BAZAAR MAY HAVE BEEN THE MOST IDEAL, IMPROMPTU AND PERFECTLY MANDATORY MEETING OF ALL TIME. These late-Middle Ages market days were social and business gatherings where people were as likely to discuss politics, religion and local gossip as they were the price of grain or the quality of meat at the last stall. I expect people remembered and valued the quality of social and intellectual connections as much or more than the actual booty traded—though the trading is what brought everyone to market in the first place.

more….

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Published on January 05, 2011 06:26

Time for a Next Net

Just posted this to Shareable: a call that we leave this Internet behind and go build a new one.

The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network – its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation – is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them – that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.

Of course the Internet was never truly free, bottom-up, decentralized, or chaotic. Yes, it may have been designed with many nodes and redundancies for it to withstand a nuclear attack, but it has always been absolutely controlled by central authorities. From its Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses, the Internet depends on highly centralized mechanisms to send our packets from one place to another.

The ease with which a Senator can make a phone call to have a website such as Wikileaks yanked from the net mirrors the ease with which an entire top-level domain, like say .ir, can be excised. And no, even if some smart people jot down the numeric ip addresses of the websites they want to see before the names are yanked, offending addresses can still be blocked by any number of cooperating government and corporate trunks, relays, and ISPs. That's why ministers in China finally concluded (in cables released by Wikileaks, no less) that the Internet was "no threat."

I'm not trying to be a downer here, or knock the possibilities for networking. I just want to smash the fiction that the Internet is some sort of uncontrollable, decentralized free-for-all, so that we can get on with the business of creating something else that is.

That's right. I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest.

Just as the fledgling peer-to-peer economy of the Late Middle Ages was quashed by a repressive monarchy that still had the power to print money and write laws, the fledgling Internet of the 21st century is being quashed by a similarly corporatist government that has its hands on the switches through which we mean to transact and communicate. It will never truly level the playing fields of commerce, politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of happening, the Internet will be adjusted to prevent it.

The fiberoptic cables running through the streets of San Francisco and New York are not a commons, they are corporate-owned. The ISPs through which we connect are no longer public universities but private media companies who not only sell us access but sell us content, block the ports through which we share, and limit the applications through which we create. They are not turning the free, public net into a shopping mall. It already *is* a shopping mall. Your revolutionary YouTube video has a Google advertisement running across the bottom. Yes, that's the price of "free" when you're operating on someone else's network.

But unlike our medieval forebears, we don't have to defend our digital commons from corporate encroachment. Fighting and losing that un-winnable battle will only reinforce our sense of helplessness, anyway. Instead of pretending that the Internet was ever destined to be our social and intellectual commons, we can much more easily conspire together to build a real networked commons, intentionally. And with this priority embedded into its very architecture and functioning.

It is not rocket science. And I know there's more than a few dozen people reading this right now who could make it happen.

Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed, many of us who wanted to network with our computers used something called FidoNet. It was a super simple way of having a network – albeit an asynchronous one.

One kid (I assume they were all kids like me, but I'm sure there were real adults doing this, too) would let his computer be used as a "server." This just meant his parents let him have his own phone line for the modem. The rest of us would call in from our computers (one at a time, of course) upload the stuff we wanted to share and download any email that had arrived for us. Once or twice a night, the server would call some other servers in the network and see if any email had arrived for anyone with an account on his machine. Super simple.

Now FidoNet employed a genuinely distributed architecture. (And if you smart hackers can say why that's wrong, and how FidoNet could have been more distributed, please continue that line of thought! You are already on your way to developing the next network.) 25 years of networking later, lessons learned, and battles fought; can you imagine how much better we could do?

So let's get on it. Shall we use telephony, ham radio, or some other part of the spectrum? Do we organize overlapping meshes of WiMax? Do we ask George Soros for some money? MacArthur Foundation? Do we even need or want them or money at all? How might the funding of our network by a central bank issued currency, or a private foundation, or a public university, bias the very architecture we are trying to build? Who gets the ability to govern or limit what may spread over our network, if anyone? Should there be ways for us to transact?

To make the sorts of choices that might actually yield our next and truly decentralized network, we must take a good look at the highly centralized real world in which we live – as well as how it got that way. Only by understanding its principles, reckoning with the forces at play, and accepting the battles we have already lost, might we begin to forge ahead to create new forms that exist beyond any authority's ability to grant them protection.

"The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network – its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation – is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them – that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.