This is the era of sharing. When the histories of our time are written a hundred years from now, sharing is the salient feature which historians will focus upon. The entirety of culture, from 1999 forward, looks like a gigantic orgy of sharing.

This morning I want to take a look at this phenomenon in some detail, and tie it into some Australian educational ‘megatrends’ – forces which are altering the landscape throughout the nation. Sharing can be used as an engine to power these forces, but that will only happen if we understand how sharing works.

At some level, sharing is totally familiar to us – we’ve been sharing since we’ve been very small. But sharing, at least in the English language, has two slightly different meanings: we can share things, or we can share thoughts. We adults spend a lot of time teaching children the importance of sharing their things; we never need to teach them to share their thoughts. The sharing of things is a cultural behavior, valued by our civilization, whereas the sharing of thoughts is an innate behavior – probably located somewhere deep in our genes.

Fifteen years ago, Nicholas Negroponte characterized this as the divide between bits and atoms. We have to teach children to share their atoms – their toys and games – but they freely share their bits. In fact, they’re so promiscuous with their bits that this has produced its own range of problems.

It was only a decade ago that Shawn Fanning released a program which he’d written for his mates at Boston’s Northeastern University. Napster allowed anyone with a computer and a broadband internet connection to share their MP3 music files freely. Within a few months, millions of broadband-connected college students were freely trading their music collections with one another – without any thought of copyright or ownership. Let me reiterate: thoughts of copyright or piracy simply didn’t enter into their thinking. To them, this was all about sharing.

This act of sharing was a natural consequence of the ‘hyperconnectivity’ these kids had achieved via their broadband connections. When you connect people together, they will begin to share the things they care about. If you build a system that allows them to share the music they care about, they’ll share that. If you build a system that allows them to share the videos they care about, they’ll share that. If you build a system that allows them to share the links they care about, they’ll share them.

Clever web developers and entrepreneurs have built all of these systems, and many, many more. For the first time we can use technology to accelerate and amplify the innate human desire to share bits, and so, in a case of history repeating itself, we have amplified our social and sharing systems the way the steam engine amplified our physical power two hundred years ago.

In the earliest years of this sharing revolution, people shared the objects of culture: music, videos, jokes, links, photos, writing, and so on. Just this alone has had an enormous impact on business and culture: the recording industries, which were flying high a decade ago, have been humbled. Television networks have gotten in front of the Internet distribution of their own shows, to take the sting out of piracy. Newspapers, caught in the crossfire between a controlled system of distribution and a world where everyone distributes everything, have begun to disappear. And this is just the beginning.

In 2001, another experiment in sharing started in earnest: Wikipedia encouraged a small community of contributors to add their own entries to an ever-expanding encyclopedia. In this case contributors were asked to share their knowledge – however specific or particular – to a greater whole. Although it grew slowly in its earliest days, after about 2 years Wikipedia hit an inflection point and began to grow explosively.

Knowledge seems to have a gravitational quality; when enough of it is gathered together in one place, it attracts more knowledge. That’s certainly the story of Wikipedia, which has grown to encompass more than three million articles in English, on nearly every topic under the sun. Wikipedia is only the most successful of many efforts to produce a ‘collective intelligence’ out of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. There are many others – including one I’ll come to shortly.

One of the singular features of Wikipedia – one that we never think about even though it’s the reason we use Wikipedia – is simply this: Wikipedia makes us smarter. We can approach Wikipedia full of ignorance and leave it knowing a lot of facts. Facts need to be put into practice before they can be transformed into knowledge, but at least with Wikipedia we now have the opportunity to load up on the facts. And this is true globally: because of Wikipedia every single one of us now has the opportunity to work with the best possible facts. We can use these facts to make better decisions, decisions which will improve our lives. Wikipedia may seem innocuous, but it’s really quite profound.

How profound? If we peel away all of the technology behind Wikipedia, all of the servers and databases and broadband connections of the world’s sixth most popular website, what are we left with? Only this: an agreement to share what we know. It’s that agreement, and not the servers or databases or bandwidth which makes Wikipedia special, and it’s that agreement historians will be writing about in a hundred years. That agreement will endure – even if, for some bizarre reason, Wikipedia should cease to exist – because that agreement is one of the engines driving our culture forward.

Another example of sharing, just as relevant to educators, comes from a site which launched back in 1999 as TeacherRatings.com. Like Wikipedia, it grew slowly, and went through ownership changes, emerging finally as RateMyProfessors.com, which is owned by MTV, and which now boasts ten million ratings of one million professors, lecturers and instructors. This huge wealth of ratings came about because RateMyProfessors.com attached itself to the innate desire to share. Students want to share their experiences with their instructors, and RateMyProfessors.com gives them a forum to do just that.

Just as is the case with Wikipedia, anyone can become smarter by using RateMyProfessors.com. You can learn which instructors are good teachers, which grade easily, which will bore you to tears, and so forth. You can then put that information to work to make your life better – avoiding the professors (or schools) which have the worst teachers, taking courses from the instructors who get the highest scores.

That shared knowledge, put to work, changes the power balance within the university. For the last six hundred years, universities have been able to saddle students with lousy instructors – who might happen to be fantastic researchers – and there wasn’t much that students could do about it except grumble. Now, with RateMyProfessors.com, students can pass their hard-won knowledge down to subsequent generations of students. The university proposes, the student disposes. Worse still, the instructors receiving the highest ratings on RateMyProfessors.com have been the subjects of bidding wars, as various universities try to woo them, and add them to their faculties. All of this has given students a power they’ve never had, a power they never could have until they began to share their experiences, and translate that shared knowledge into action.

Sharing is wonderful, but sharing has consequences. We can now amplify and accelerate our sharing so that it can cross the world in a matter of moments, copied and replicated all the way. The power of the network has driven us into a new era. Sharing culture, knowledge, and power has destabilized all of our institutions. Businesses totter and collapse; universities change their practices; governments create task forces to get in front of what everyone calls ‘something-2.0’. It could be web2.0, education2.0, or government2.0. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that something big is happening, and it’s all driven by our ability to share.

OK, so we can share. But why? How does it matter to us?

II: Greenfields

Before we can look at why sharing matters so much in this particular moment, we need to spend some time examining the three big events which will revolutionize education in Australia over the next decade. Each of them are entirely revolutionary in themselves; their confluence will result in a compressed wave of change – a concrescence – that will radically transform all educational practice.

The first of these events will affect all Australians equally. At this moment in time, Australia lives with medium-to-low-end broadband speeds, and most families have broadband connections which, because of metering, fundamentally limit their use. This is how it’s been since the widespread adoption of the Internet in the mid-1990s, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine that things could be different. The hidden lesson of the last fifteen years is that the Internet is something that needs to be rationed carefully, because there’s not enough to go around.

The Government wants us to adopt a different point of view. With the National Broadband Network (NBN), they intend to build a fibre-optic infrastructure which will deliver at least 100 megabit-per-second connections to every home, every school, and every business in Australia. Although no one has come out and said it explicitly, it’s clear that the Government wants this connection to be unmetered – the Internet will finally be freely available in Australia, as it is in most other countries.

How this will change our usage of the Internet is anyone’s guess. And this is the important point – we don’t know what will happen. We have critics of the NBN claiming that there’s no good reason for it, that Australians are already adequately served by the broadband we’ve already got, but I regularly hear stories of schools which block YouTube – not because of its potentially distracting qualities, but because they can’t handle the demand for bandwidth.

That, writ large, describes Australia in 2009. Broadband is the oxygen of the 21st century. Australia has been subjected to a slow strangulation. Once we can breathe freely, new horizons will open to us. We know this is true from history: no one really knew what we’d do with broadband once we got it. No one predicted Napster or YouTube or Skype, no one could have predicted any of them – or any of a thousand other innovations – before we had widespread access to broadband. Critics who argue there’s no need for high-speed broadband have simply failed to learn the lessons of history.

Now, before you think that I’m carrying the Government’s water, let me find fault with a few things. I believe that the Government isn’t thinking big enough – by the time the NBN is fully deployed, around 2017, a hundred megabit-per-second connection will simply be mid-range among our OECD peers. The Government should have accepted the technical challenge and gone for a gigabit network. Eventually, they will. Further, I believe the NBN will come with ‘strings attached’, specifically the filtering and regulatory regime currently being proposed by Senator Conroy’s ministry. The Government wants to provide the nation a ‘clean feed’, sanitized according to its interpretation of the law; when everyone in Australia gets their Internet service from the Commonwealth, we may have no choice in the matter.

The next event – and perhaps the most salient, in the context of this conference – is the Government’s commitment to provide a computer to every student in years 9 through 12. During the 2007 election, the Prime Minister talked about using computers for ‘math drills’ and ‘foreign language training’. The line about providing computers in the classroom was a popular one, although it is now clear that the Government’s ministers didn’t think through the profound effect of pervasive computing in the classroom.

First, it radically alters the power balance in the classroom. Most students have more facility with their computers than their teachers do. Some teachers are prepared to work from humility and accept instruction from their students. For other teachers, such an idea is anathema. The power balance could be righted somewhat with extensive professional development for the teachers – and time for that professional development – but schools have neither the budget nor the time to allow for this. Instead, the computers are being dumped into the classroom without any thought as to how they will affect pedagogy.

Second, these computers are being handed to students who may not be wholly aware of the potency of these devices. We’ve seen how a single text message, forwarded endlessly, can spark a riot on a Sydney beach, or how a party invitation, posted to Facebook, can lead to a crowd of five hundred and a battle with the police. Do teenagers really understand how to use the network to their advantage, how to reinforce their own privacy and protect themselves? Do they know how easy it is to ruin their own lives – or someone else’s – if they abuse the power of the network, that amplifier and accelerator of sharing?

Teachers aren’t the only ones who need some professional development. We need to provide a strong curriculum in ‘digital citizenship’; just as teenagers get instruction before they get a driver’s license, so they need instruction before they get to ‘spin the wheels’ of these ubiquitous educational computers.

This isn’t a problem that can be solved by filtering the networks at the schools. Students are surrounded by too many devices – mobiles as well as computers – which connect to the network and which require a degree of caution and education. This isn’t a job that the schools should be handling alone; this is an opportunity for all of the adult voices of culture – parents, caretakers, mentors, educators and administrators – to speak as one about the potentials and pitfalls of network culture.

Finally, what is the goal here? Right now the students and teachers are getting their computers. Next year the deployment will be nearly complete. What, in the end, is the point? Is it simply to give Kevin Rudd a tick on his ‘promises fulfilled’ list when he goes up for re-election? Or is this an opening to something greater? Is this simply more of the same or something new? I haven’t seen any educator anywhere present anything that looks at all like an integrated vision of what these laptops mean to students, teachers or the classroom. They’re bling: pretty, but an entirely useless accessory. I’m not saying that this is a bad initiative – indeed, I believe the Government should be lauded for its efforts. But everything, thus far, feels only like a beginning, the first meter around a very long course.

Now we come to the most profound of the three events on the educational horizon: the National Curriculum. Although the idea of a national curriculum has been mooted by several successive governments, it looks as though we’ll finally achieve a deliverable curriculum sometime in the early years of the Rudd Government. There’s a long way to go, of course – and a lot of tussling between the states and the various educational stakeholders – but the process is well underway. It’s expected that curricula in ‘English, Mathematics, the Sciences and History’ will be ready for implementation in the start of 2011, not very far away. As these are the core elements in any school curriculum, they will affect every school, every teacher, and every student in Australia.

A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to share the stage with Dr. Evan Arthur, the Group Manager of the Digital Education Group at the Commonwealth Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. During a ‘fireside chat’, when I asked him a series of questions, the topic turned to the National Curriculum. At this point Dr. Arthur became rather thoughtful, and described the National Curriculum as a “greenfields”. He went on to describe the curriculum documents, when completed, as a set of ‘strings’ which could be handled almost as if they were a Christmas tree, ready to have content hung all over them. The National Curriculum means that every educator in Australia is, for the first time, working to the same set of ‘strings’.

That’s when I became aware that Dr. Arthur saw the National Curriculum as an enormous opportunity to redraw the possibilities for education. We are all being given an opportunity to start again – to throw out the old rule book and start over with another one. But in order to do this we’ll have to take everything we’ve covered already – about sharing, the National Broadband Network, the Digital Education Revolution and the National Curriculum, then blend them together. Together they produce a very potent mix, a nexus of possibilities which could fundamentally transform education in Australia.

III: At The Nexus

Our future is a future of sharing; we’ll be improving constantly, finding better and better ways to share with one another. To this I want to add something more subtle; not a change in technology – we have a lot of technology – but rather, a change of direction and intent. We could choose to see the National Curriculum as simply another mandate from the Federal government, something that will make the educational process even more formal, rigorous, and lifeless. That option is open to us – and, to many of us, that’s the only option visible. I want to suggest that there is another, wildly different path open before us, right next to this well-trodden and much more prosaic laneway. Rather than viewing the National Curriculum as a done deal, wouldn’t it be wiser if we consider it as an open invitation to participation and sharing?

After all, the National Curriculum mandates what must be taught, but says little to nothing about how it gets taught. Teachers remain free to pursue their own pedagogical ends. That said, teachers across Australia will, for the first time, be pursing the same ends. This opens up a space and a rationale for sharing that never existed before. Everyone is pulling in the same direction; wouldn’t it make sense for teachers, students, administrators and parents to share the experience?

Let’s be realistic: whether or not we seek to formalize this sharing of experience, it will happen anyway, on BoredOfStudies.org, RateMyTeachers.com, a hundred other websites, a thousand blogs, a hundred thousand Facebook profiles, and a million tweets. But if it all happens out there, informally, we miss an enormous opportunity to let sharing power our transition to into the National Curriculum. We’d be letting our greatest and most powerful asset slip through our fingers.

So let me turn this around and project us into a future where we have decided to formalize our shared experience of the National Curriculum. What might that look like? A teacher might normally prepare their curriculum and pedagogical materials at the beginning of the school term; during that preparation process they would check into a shared space, organized around the National Curriculum (this should be done formally, through an organization such as Education.AU, but could – and would – happen informally, via Google) to find out what other educators have created and shared as curriculum materials. Educators would find extensive notes, lesson plans, probably numerous recorded podcasts, links to materials on Wikipedia and other online resources, and so forth – everything that an educator might need to create an effective learning experience. Furthermore, educators would be encourage to share and connect around any particular ‘string’ in the National Curriculum. The curriculum thus becomes a focal point for organization and coordination rather than a brute mandate of performance.

Students, already well-connected, will continue to use informal channels to communicate about their lessons; the National Curriculum gives the educational sector (and perhaps some enterprising entrepreneur) an opportunity to create a space where those curriculum ‘strings’ translate into points of contact. Students working through a particular point in the curriculum would know where they are, and would know where to gather together for help and advice. The same wealth of materials available to educators would be available to students. None of this constitutes ‘peeking at the answers’, but rather is part of an integrated effort to give students every advantage while working their way through the National Curriculum. A student in Townsville might be able to gain some advantage from a podcast of a teacher in Albany, might want to collaborate on research with students from Ballarat, might ask some questions of an educator in Lismore. The student sits in the middle of an nexus of resources designed to offer them every opportunity to succeed; if the methodology of their own classroom is a poor fit to their learning style, chances are high that they’ll find someone else, somewhere else, who makes a better match.

All of this sounds a lot like an educational utopia, but all of it is within our immediate grasp. It is because we live at the confluence of a broadly sharing culture, and within a nation which is getting ubiquitous high-speed broadband, students and educators who now have pervasive access to computers, and a National Curriculum to act as an organizing principle. It is precisely because the stars are aligned so auspiciously that we can dream big dreams. This is the moment when anything is possible.

This transition could simply reinforce the last hundred years of industrial era education, where one-size-fits-all, where the student enters ‘airplane mode’ when they walk into the classroom – all devices disconnected, eyes up and straight ahead for the boredom of a fifty-minute excursion through some meaningless and disconnected body of knowledge. Where the computer simply becomes an electronic textbook for the distribution of media, rather than a portal for the exploration of the knowledge shared by others. Where the educator finds themselves increasingly bound to a curriculum which limits their freedom to find expression and meaning in their work. And all of this will happen, unless we recognize the other path that has opened before us. Unless we change direction, and set our feet on that path. Because if we keep on as we have been, we’ll simply end up with what we have today. And that would be a big mistake.

It needn’t be this way. We can take advantage of our situation, of the concrescence of opportunities opening to us. It will take some work, some time and some money. But more than anything else it requires a change of heart. We must stop thinking of the classroom as a solitary island of peace and quiet in the midst of a stormy sea, and rather think of it as a node within a network, connected and receptive. We must stop thinking of educators as valiant but solitary warriors, and transform them into a connected and receptive army. And we must recognize that this generation of students are so well connected on every front that they outpace us in every advance. They will be teaching us how to make this transition seem effortless.

Can we do this? Can we screw our courage up and take a leap into a great unknown, into an educational future which draws from our past, but is not bound to it? With parents and politicians crying out for metrics and endless assessments, we are losing the space to experiment, to play, to explore. Next year, the National Curriculum will land like a ton of bricks, even as it presents the opportunity for a Great Escape. The next twelve months will be crucial. If we can only change the way we think about what is possible, we will change what is possible. It’s a big ask. It’s the challenge of our times. Will we rise to meet it? Can we make an agreement to share what we know and what we do? That’s all it takes. So simple and so profound.

Slides for this talk are available here.

Sharing Power (Global Edition) from Mark Pesce on Vimeo.

My keynote from the Personal Democracy Forum, New York City, 30 June 2009.

Introduction: War is Over (if you want it)

Over the last year we have lived through a profound and perhaps epochal shift in the distribution of power. A year ago all the talk was about how to mobilize Facebook users to turn out on election day. Today we bear witness to a ‘green’ revolution, coordinated via Twitter, and participate as the Guardian UK crowdsources the engines of investigative journalism and democratic oversight to uncover the unpleasant little secrets buried in the MPs expenses scandal – secrets which the British government has done everything in its power to withhold.

We’ve turned a corner. We’re on the downward slope. It was a long, hard slog to the top – a point we obviously reached on 4 November 2008 – but now the journey is all about acceleration into a future that looks almost nothing like the past. The configuration of power has changed: its distribution, its creation, its application. The trouble with circumstances of acceleration is that they go hand-in-hand with a loss of control. At a certain point our entire global culture is liable to start hydroplaning, or worse, will go airborne. As the well-oiled wheels of culture leave the roadbed of civilization behind, we can spin the steering wheel all we want. Nothing will happen. Acceleration has its own rationale, and responds neither to reason nor desire. Force will meet force. Force is already meeting force.

What happens now, as things speed up, is a bit like what happens in the guts of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Different polities and institutions will smash and reveal their inner workings, like parts sprung from crashed cars. We can learn a lot – if we’re clever enough to watch these collisions as they happen. Some of these particles-in-collision will recognizably be governments or quasi-governmental organizations. Some will look nothing like them. But before we glory, Ballard-like, in the terrible beauty of the crash, we should remember that these institutions are, first and foremost, the domain of people, individuals ill-prepared for whiplash or a sudden impact with the windshield. No one is wearing a safety belt, even as things slip noticeably beyond control. Someone’s going to get hurt. That much is already clear.

What we urgently need, and do not yet have, is a political science for the 21st century. We need to understand the autopoietic formation of polities, which has been so accelerated and amplified in this era of hyperconnectivity. We need to understand the mechanisms of knowledge sharing among these polities, and how they lead to hyperintelligence. We need to understand how hyperintelligence transforms into action, and how this action spreads and replicates itself through hypermimesis. We have the words – or some of them – but we lack even an informal understanding of the ways and means. As long as this remains the case, we are subject to terrible accidents we can neither predict nor control. We can end the war between ourselves and our times. But first we must watch carefully. The collisions are mounting, and they have already revealed much. We have enough data to begin to draw a map of this wholly new territory.

I: The First Casualty of War

Last month saw an interesting and unexpected collision. Wikipedia, the encyclopedia created by and for the people, decreed that certain individuals and a certain range of IP addresses belonging to the Church of Scientology would hereafter be banned from the capability to edit Wikipedia. This directive came from the Arbitration Committee of Wikipedia, which sounds innocuous, but is in actuality the equivalent the Supreme Court in the Wikipediaverse.

It seems that for some period of time – probably stretching into years – there have been any number of ‘edit wars’ (where edits are made and reverted, then un-reverted and re-reverted, ad infinitum) around articles concerning about the Church of Scientology and certain of the personages in the Church. These pages have been subject to fierce edit wars between Church of Scientology members on one side, critics of the Church on the other, and, in the middle, Wikipedians, who attempted to referee the dispute, seeking, above all, to preserve the Neutral Point-of-View (NPOV) that the encyclopedia aspires to in every article. When this became impossible – when the Church of Scientology and its members refused to leave things alone – a consensus gradually formed within the tangled adhocracy of Wikipedia, finalized in last month’s ruling from the Arbitration Committee. For at least six months, several Church of Scientology members are banned by name, and all Church computers are banned from making edits to Wikipedia.

That would seem to be that. But it’s not. The Church of Scientology has been diligent in ensuring that the mainstream media (make no mistake, Wikipedia is now a mainstream medium) do not portray characterizations of Scientology which are unflattering to the Church. There’s no reason to believe that things will simply rest as they are now, that everyone will go off and skulk in their respective corners for six months, like children given a time-out. Indeed, the Chairman of Scientology, David Miscavidge, quickly issued a press release comparing the Wikipedians to Nazis, asking, “What’s next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?”

How this skirmish plays out in the months and years to come will be driven by the structure and nature of these two wildly different organizations. The Church of Scientology is the very model of a modern religious hierarchy; all power and control flows down from Chairman David Miscavidge through to the various levels of Scientology. With Wikipedia, no one can be said to be in charge. (Jimmy Wales is not in charge of Wikipedia.) The whole things chugs along as an agreement, a social contract between the parties participating in the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia. Power flows in Wikipedia are driven by participation: the more you participate, the more power you’ll have. Power is distributed laterally: every individual who edits Wikipedia has some ultimate authority.

What happens when these two organizations, so fundamentally mismatched in their structures and power flows, attempt to interact? The Church of Scientology uses lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits as a coercive technique. But Wikipedia has thus far proven immune to lawsuits. Although there is a non-profit entity behind Wikipedia, running its servers and paying for its bandwidth, that is not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the machines, it is not the bandwidth, it is not even the full database of articles. Wikipedia is a social agreement. It is an agreement to share what we know, for the greater good of all. How does the Church of Scientology control that? This is the question that confronts every hierarchical organization when it collides with an adhocracy. Adhocracies present no control surfaces; they are at once both entirely transparent and completely smooth.

This could all get much worse. The Church of Scientology could ‘declare war’ on Wikipedia. A general in such a conflict might work to poison the social contract which powers Wikipedia, sewing mistrust, discontent and the presumption of malice within a community that thrives on trust, consensus-building and adherence to a common vision. Striking at the root of the social contract which is the whole of Wikipedia could possibly disrupt its internal networks and dissipate the human energy which drives the project.

Were we on the other side of the conflict, running a defensive strategy, we would seek to reinforce Wikipedia’s natural strength – the social agreement. The stronger the social agreement, the less effective any organized attack will be. A strong social agreement implies a depth of social resources which can be deployed to prevent or rapidly ameliorate damage.

Although this conflict between the Church of Scientology and Wikipedia may never explode into a full-blown conflict, at some point in the future, some other organization or institution will collide with Wikipedia, and battle lines will be drawn. The whole of this quarter of the 21st century looks like an accelerating series of run-ins between hierarchical organizations and adhocracies. What happens when the hierarchies find that their usual tools of war are entirely mismatched to their opponent?

II: War is Hell

Even the collision between friendly parties, when thus mismatched, can be devastating. Rasmus Klies Nielsen, a PhD student in Columbia’s Communications program, wrote an interesting study a few months ago in which he looked at “communication overload”, which he identifies as a persistent feature of online activism. Nielsen specifically studied the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign in New York, and learned that some of the best-practices of the Obama campaign failed utterly when they encountered an energized and empowered public.

The Obama campaign encouraged voters to communicate through its website, both with one another and with the campaign’s New York staff. Although New York had been written off by the campaign (Hilary Clinton was sure to win her home state), the state still housed many very strong and vocal Obama supporters (apocryphally, all from Manhattan’s Upper West Side). These supporters flooded into the Obama campaign website for New York, drowning out the campaign itself. As election day loomed, campaign staffers retreated to “older” communication techniques – that is, mobile phones – while Obama’s supporters continued the conversation through the website. A complete disconnection between campaign and supporters occurred, even though the parties had the same goals.

Political campaigns may be chaotic, but they are also very hierarchically structured. There is an orderly flow of power from top (candidate) to bottom (voter). Each has an assigned role. When that structure is short-circuited and replaced by an adhocracy, the instrumentality of the hierarchy overloads. We haven’t yet seen the hybrid beast which can function hierarchically yet interaction with an adhocracy. At this point when the two touch, the hierarchy simply shorts out.

Another example from the Obama general election campaign illustrates this tendency for hierarchies to short out when interacting with friendly adhocracies. Project Houdini was touted as a vast, distributed GOTV program which would allow tens of thousands of field workers to keep track of who had voted and who hadn’t. Project Houdini was among the most ambitious of the online efforts of the Obama campaign, and was thoroughly tested in the days leading up to the general election. But, once election day came, Project Houdini went down almost immediately under the volley of information coming in from every quadrant of the nation, from fieldworkers thoroughly empowered to gather and report GOTV data to the campaign. A patchwork backup plan allowed the campaign to tame the torrent of data, channeling it through field offices. But the great vision of the Obama campaign, to empower the individuals with the capability to gather and report GOTV data, came crashing down, because the system simply couldn’t handle the crush of the empowered field workers.

Both of these collisions happened in ‘friendly fire’ situations, where everyone’s eyes were set on achieving the same goal. But these two systems of organization are so foreign to one another that we still haven’t seen any successful attempt to span the chasm that separates them. Instead, we see collisions and failures. The political campaigns of the future must learn how to cross that gulf. While some may wish to turn the clock back to an earlier time when campaigns respected carefully-wrought hierarchies, the electorates of the 21st century, empowered in their own right, have already come to expect that their candidate’s campaigns will meet them in that empowerment. The next decade is going to be completely hellish for politicians and campaign workers of every party as new rules and systems are worked out. There are no successful examples – yet. But circumstances are about to force a search for solutions.

III: War is Peace

As governments release the vast amounts of data held and generated by them, communities of interest are rising up to work with that data. As these communities become more knowledgeable, more intelligent – hyperintelligent – via this exposure, this hyperintelligence will translate into action: hyperempowerment. This is all well and good so long as the aims of the state are the same as the aims of the community. A community of hyperempowered citizens can achieve lofty goals in partnership with the state. But even here, the hyperempowered community faces a mismatch with the mechanisms of the state. The adhocracy by which the community thrives has no easy way to match its own mechanisms with those of the state. Even with the best intentions, every time the two touch there is the risk of catastrophic collapse. The failures of Project Houdini will be repeated, and this might lead some to argue that the opening up itself was a mistake. In fact, these catastrophes are the first sign of success. Connection is being made.

In order to avoid catastrophe, the state – and any institution which attempts to treat with a hyperintelligence – must radically reform its own mechanisms of communication. Top-down hierarchies which order power precisely can not share power with hyperintelligence. The hierarchy must open itself to a more chaotic and fundamentally less structured relationship with the hyperintelligence it has helped to foster. This is the crux of the problem, asking the leopard to change its spots. Only in transformation can hierarchy find its way into a successful relationship with hyperintelligence. But can any hierarchy change without losing its essence? Can the state – or any institution – become more flexible, fluid and dynamic while maintaining its essential qualities?

And this is the good case, the happy outcome, where everyone is pulling in the same direction. What happens when aims differ, when some hyperintelligence for some reason decides that it is antithetical to the interests of an institution or a state? We’ve seen the beginnings of this in the weird, slow war between the Church of Scientology and ANONYMOUS, a shadowy organization which coordinates its operations through a wiki. In recent weeks ANONYMOUS has also taken on the Basidj paramilitaries in Iran, and China’s internet censors. ANONYMOUS pools its information, builds hyperintelligence, and translates that hyperintelligence into hyperempowerment. Of course, they don’t use these words. ANONYMOUS is simply a creature of its times, born in an era of hyperconnectivity.

It might be more profitable to ask what happens when some group, working the data supplied at Recovery.gov or Data.gov or you-name-it.gov, learns of something that they’re opposed to, then goes to work blocking the government’s activities. In some sense, this is good old-fashioned activism, but it is amplified by the technologies now at hand. That amplification could be seen as a threat by the state; such activism could even be labeled terrorism. Even when this activism is well-intentioned, the mismatch and collision between the power of the state and any hyperempowered polities means that such mistakes will be very easy to make.

We will need to engage in a close examination of the intersection between the state and the various hyperempowered actors which rising up over next few years. Fortunately, the Obama administration, in its drive to make government data more transparent and more accessible (and thereby more likely to generate hyperintelligence around it) has provided the perfect laboratory to watch these hyperintelligences as they emerge and spread their wings. Although communication’s PhD candidates undoubtedly will be watching and taking notes, public policy-makers also should closely observe everything that happens. Since the rules of the game are changing, observation is the first most necessary step toward a rational future. Examining the pushback caused by these newly emerging communities will give us our first workable snapshot of a political science for the 21st century.

The 21st century will continue to see the emergence of powerful and hyperempowered communities. Sometimes these will challenge hierarchical organizations, such as with Wikipedia and the Church of Scientology; sometimes they will work with hierarchical organizations, as with Project Houdini; and sometimes it will be very hard to tell what the intended outcomes are. In each case the hierarchy – be it a state or an institution – will have to adapt itself into a new power role, a new sharing of power. In the past, like paired with like: states shared power with states, institutions with institutions, hierarchies with hierarchies. We are leaving this comfortable and familiar time behind, headed into a world where actors of every shape and description find themselves sufficiently hyperempowered to challenge any hierarchy. Even when they seek to work with a state or institution, they present challenges. Peace is war. In either direction, the same paradox confronts us: power must surrender power, or be overwhelmed by it. Sharing power is not an ideal of some utopian future; it’s the ground truth of our hyperconnected world.

The Power of Sharing from Mark Pesce on Vimeo.

Inaugural address for the “What’s the Big Idea?” lecture series, at the Bundeena Bowls Club in Bundeena, a small community (pop. 3500) just south of Sydney in Royal National Park.

In the US state of North Carolina, the New York Times reports, an interesting experiment has been in progress since the first of February. The “Birds and Bees Text Line” invites teenagers with any questions relating to sex or the mysteries of dating to SMS their question to a phone number. That number connects these teenagers to an on-duty adult at the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign. Within 24 hours, the teenager gets a reply to their text. The questions range from the run-of-the-mill – “When is a person not a virgin anymore?” – and the unusual – “If you have sex underwater do u need a condom?” – to the utterly heart-rending – “Hey, I’m preg and don’t know how 2 tell my parents. Can you help?”

The Birds and Bees Text Line is a response to the slow rise in the number of teenage pregnancies in North Carolina, which reached its lowest ebb in 2003. Teenagers – who are given state-mandated abstinence-only sex education in school – now have access to another resource, unmediated by teachers or parents, to prevent another generation of teenage pregnancies. Although it’s early days yet, the response to the program has been positive. Teenagers are using the Birds and Bees Text Line.

It is precisely because the Birds and Bees Text Line is unmediated by parental control that it has earned the ire of the more conservative elements in North Carolina. Bill Brooks, president of the North Carolina Family Policy Council, a conservative group, complained to the Times about the lack of oversight. “If I couldn’t control access to this service, I’d turn off the texting service. When it comes to the Internet, parents are advised to put blockers on their computer and keep it in a central place in the home. But kids can have access to this on their cell phones when they’re away from parental influence – and it can’t be controlled.”

If I’d stuffed words into a straw man’s mouth, I couldn’t have come up with a better summation of the situation we’re all in right now: young and old, rich and poor, liberal and conservative. There are certain points where it becomes particularly obvious, such as with the Birds and Bees Text Line, but this example simply amplifies our sense of the present as a very strange place, an undiscovered country that we’ve all suddenly been thrust into. Conservatives naturally react conservatively, seeking to preserve what has worked in the past; Bill Brooks speaks for a large cohort of people who feel increasingly lost in this bewildering present.

Let us assume, for a moment, that conservatism was in the ascendant (though this is clearly not the case in the United States, one could make a good argument that the Rudd Government is, in many ways, more conservative than its predecessor). Let us presume that Bill Brooks and the people for whom he speaks could have the Birds and Bees Text Line shut down. Would that, then, be the end of it? Would we have stuffed the genie back into the bottle? The answer, unquestionably, is no.

Everyone who has used or even heard of the Birds and Bees Text Line would be familiar with what it does and how it works. Once demonstrated, it becomes much easier to reproduce. It would be relatively straightforward to take the same functions performed by the Birds and Bees Text Line and “crowdsource” them, sharing the load across any number of dedicated volunteers who might, through some clever software, automate most of the tasks needed to distribute messages throughout the “cloud” of volunteers. Even if it took a small amount of money to setup and get going, that kind of money would be available from donors who feel that teenage sexual education is a worthwhile thing.

In other words, the same sort of engine which powers Wikipedia can be put to work across a number of different “platforms”. The power of sharing allows individuals to come together in great “clouds” of activity, and allows them to focus their activity around a single task. It could be an encyclopedia, or it could be providing reliable and judgment-free information about sexuality to teenagers. The form matters not at all: what matters is that it’s happening, all around us, everywhere throughout the world.

The cloud, this new thing, this is really what has Bill Brooks scared, because it is, quite literally, ‘out of control’. It arises naturally out of the human condition of ‘hyperconnection’. We are so much better connected than we were even a decade ago, and this connectivity breeds new capabilities. The first of these capabilities are the pooling and sharing of knowledge – or ‘hyperintelligence’. Consider: everyone who reads Wikipedia is potentially as smart as the smartest person who’s written an article in Wikipedia. Wikipedia has effectively banished ignorance born of want of knowledge. The Birds and Bees Text Line is another form of hyperintelligence, connecting adults with knowledge to teenagers in desperate need of that knowledge.

Hyperconnectivity also means that we can carefully watch one another, and learn from one another’s behaviors at the speed of light. This new capability – ‘hypermimesis’ – means that new behaviors, such as the Birds and Bees Text Line, can be seen and copied very quickly. Finally, hypermimesis means that that communities of interest can form around particular behaviors, ‘clouds’ of potential. These communities range from the mundane to the arcane, and they are everywhere online. But only recently have they discovered that they can translate their community into doing, putting hyperintelligence to work for the benefit of the community. This is the methodology of the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign. This is the methodology of Wikipedia. This is the methodology of Wikileaks, which seeks to provide a safe place for whistle-blowers who want to share the goods on those who attempt to defraud or censor or suppress. This is the methodology of ANONYMOUS, which seeks to expose Scientology as a ridiculous cult. How many more examples need to be listed before we admit that the rules have changed, that the smooth functioning of power has been terrifically interrupted by these other forces, now powers in their own right?

II: Affairs of State

Don’t expect a revolution. We will not see masses of hyperconnected individuals, storming the Winter Palaces of power. This is not a proletarian revolt. It is, instead, rather more subtle and complex. The entire nature of power has changed, as have the burdens of power. Power has always carried with it the ‘burden of omniscience’ – that is, those at the top of the hierarchy have to possess a complete knowledge of everything of importance happening everywhere under their control. Where they lose grasp of that knowledge, that’s the space where coups, palace revolutions and popular revolts take place.

This new power that flows from the cloud of hyperconnectivity carries a different burden, the ‘burden of connection’. In order to maintain the cloud, and our presence within it, we are beholden to it. We must maintain each of the social relationships, each of the informational relationships, each of the knowledge relationships and each of the mimetic relationships within the cloud. Without that constant activity, the cloud dissipates, evaporating into nothing at all.

This is not a particularly new phenomenon; Dunbar’s Number demonstrates that we are beholden to the ‘tribe’ of our peers, the roughly 150 individuals who can find a place in our heads. In pre-civilization, the cloud was the tribe. Should the members of tribe interrupt the constant reinforcement of their social, informational, knowledge-based and mimetic relationships, the tribe would dissolve and disperse – as happens to a tribe when it grows beyond the confines of Dunbar’s Number.

In this hyperconnected era, we can pick and choose which of our human connections deserves reinforcement; the lines of that reinforcement shape the scope of our power. Studies of Japanese teenagers using mobiles and twenty-somethings on Facebook have shown that, most of the time, activity is directed toward a small circle of peers, perhaps six or seven others. This ‘co-presence’ is probably a modern echo of an ancient behavior, presumably related to the familial unit.

While we might desire to extend our power and capabilities through our networks of hyperconnections, the cost associated with such investments is very high. Time spent invested in a far-flung cloud is time that lost on networks closer to home. Yet individuals will nonetheless often dedicate themselves to some cause greater than themselves, despite the high price paid, drawn to some higher ideal.

The Obama campaign proved an interesting example of the price of connectivity. During the Democratic primary for the state of New York (which Hilary Clinton was expected to win easily), so many individuals contacted the campaign through its website that the campaign itself quickly became overloaded with the number of connections it was expected to maintain. By election day, the campaign staff in New York had retreated from the web, back to using mobiles. They had detached from the ‘cloud’ connectivity they used the web to foster, instead focusing their connectivity on the older model of the six or seven individuals in co-present connection. The enormous cloud of power which could have been put to work in New York lay dormant, unorganized, talking to itself through the Obama website, but effectively disconnected from the Obama campaign.

For each of us, connectivity carries a high price. For every organization which attempts to harness hyperconnectivity, the price is even higher. With very few exceptions, organizations are structured along hierarchical lines. Power flows from bottom to the top. Not only does this create the ‘burden of omniscience’ at the highest levels of the organization, it also fundamentally mismatches the flows of power in the cloud. When the hierarchy comes into contact with an energized cloud, the ‘discharge’ from the cloud to the hierarchy can completely overload the hierarchy. That’s the power of hyperconnectivity.

Another example from the Obama campaign demonstrates this power. Project Houdini was touted out by the Obama campaign as a system which would get the grassroots of the campaign to funnel their GOTV results into a centralized database, which could then be used to track down individuals who hadn’t voted, in order to offer them assistance in getting to their local polling station. The campaign grassroots received training in Project Houdini, when through a field test of the software and procedures, then waited for election day. On election day, Project Houdini lasted no more than 15 minutes before it crashed under the incredible number of empowered individuals who attempted to plug data into Project Houdini. Although months in the making, Project Houdini proved that a centralized and hierarchical system for campaign management couldn’t actually cope with the ‘cloud’ of grassroots organizers.

In the 21st century we now have two oppositional methods of organization: the hierarchy and the cloud. Each of them carry with them their own costs and their own strengths. Neither has yet proven to be wholly better than the other. One could make an argument that both have their own roles into the future, and that we’ll be spending a lot of time learning which works best in a given situation. What we have already learned is that these organizational types are mostly incompatible: unless very specific steps are taken, the cloud overpowers the hierarchy, or the hierarchy dissipates the cloud. We need to think about the interfaces that can connect one to the other. That’s the area that all organizations – and very specifically, non-profit organizations – will be working through in the coming years. Learning how to harness the power of the cloud will mark the difference between a modest success and overwhelming one. Yet working with the cloud will present organizational challenges of an unprecedented order. There is no way that any hierarchy can work with a cloud without becoming fundamentally changed by the experience.

III: Affair de Coeur

All organizations are now confronted with two utterly divergent methodologies for organizing their activities: the tower and the cloud. The tower seeks to organize everything in hierarchies, control information flows, and keep the power heading from bottom to top. The cloud isn’t formally organized, pools its information resources, and has no center of power. Despite all of its obvious weaknesses, the cloud can still transform itself into a formidable power, capable of overwhelming the tower. To push the metaphor a little further, the cloud can become a storm.

How does this happen? What is it that turns a cloud into a storm? Jimmy Wales has said that the success of any language-variant version of Wikipedia comes down to the dedicated efforts of five individuals. Once he spies those five individuals hard at work in Pashtun or Khazak or Xhosa, he knows that edition of Wikipedia will become a success. In other words, five people have to take the lead, leading everyone else in the cloud with their dedication, their selflessness, and their openness. This number probably holds true in a cloud of any sort – find five like-minded individuals, and the transformation from cloud to storm will begin.

At the end of that transformation there is still no hierarchy. There are, instead, concentric circles of involvement. At the innermost, those five or more incredibly dedicated individuals; then a larger circle of a greater number, who work with that inner five as time and opportunity allow; and so on, outward, at decreasing levels of involvement, until we reach those who simply contribute a word or a grammatical change, and have no real connection with the inner circle, except in commonality of purpose. This is the model for Wikipedia, for Wikileaks, and for ANONYMOUS. This is the cloud model, fully actualized as a storm. At this point the storm can challenge any tower.

But the storm doesn’t have things all its own way; to present a challenge to a tower is to invite the full presentation of its own power, which is very rude, very physical, and potentially very deadly. Wikipedians at work on the Farsi version of the encyclopedia face arrest and persecution by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and religious police. Just a few weeks ago, after the contents of the Australian government’s internet blacklist was posted to Wikileaks, the German government invaded the home of the man who owns the domain name for Wikileaks in Germany. The tower still controls most of the power apparatus in the world, and that power can be used to squeeze any potential competitors.

But what happens when you try to squeeze a cloud? Effectively, nothing at all. Wikipedia has no head to decapitate. Jimmy Wales is an effective cheerleader and face for the press, but his presence isn’t strictly necessary. There are over 2000 Wikipedians who handle the day-to-day work. Locking all of them away, while possible, would only encourage further development in the cloud, as other individuals moved to fill their places. Moreover, any attempt to disrupt the cloud only makes the cloud more resilient. This has been demonstrated conclusively from the evolution of ‘darknets’, private file-sharing networks, which grew up as the legal and widely available file-sharing networks, such as Napster, were shut down by the copyright owners. Attacks on the cloud only improve the networks within the cloud, only make the leaders more dedicated, only increase the information and knowledge sharing within the cloud. Trying to disperse a storm only intensifies it.

These are not idle speculations; the tower will seek to contain the storm by any means necessary. The 21st century will increasingly look like a series of collisions between towers and storms. Each time the storm emerges triumphant, the tower will become more radical and determined in its efforts to disperse the storm, which will only result in a more energized and intensified storm. This is not a game that the tower can win by fighting. Only by opening up and adjusting itself to the structure of the cloud can the tower find any way forward.

What, then, is leadership in the cloud? It is not like leadership in the tower. It is not a position wrought from power, but authority in its other, and more primary meaning, ‘to be the master of’. Authority in the cloud is drawn from dedication, or, to use rather more precise language, love. Love is what holds the cloud together. People are attracted to the cloud because they are in love with the aim of the cloud. The cloud truly is an affair of the heart, and these affairs of the heart will be the engines that drive 21st century business, politics and community.

Author and pundit Clay Shirky has stated, “The internet is better at stopping things than starting them.” I reckon he’s wrong there: the internet is very good at starting things that stop things. But it is very good at starting things. Making the jump from an amorphous cloud of potentiality to a forceful storm requires the love of just five people. That’s not much to ask. If you can’t get that many people in love with your cause, it may not be worth pursing.

Conclusion: Managing Your Affairs

All 21st century organizations need to recognize and adapt to the power of the cloud. It’s either that or face a death of a thousand cuts, the slow ebbing of power away from hierarchically-structured organizations as newer forms of organization supplant them. But it need not be this way. It need not be an either/or choice. It could be a future of and-and-and, where both forms continue to co-exist peacefully. But that will only come to pass if hierarchies recognize the power of the cloud.

This means you.

All of you have your own hierarchical organizations – because that’s how organizations have always been run. Yet each of you are surrounded by your own clouds: community organizations (both in the real world and online), bulletin boards, blogs, and all of the other Web2.0 supports for the sharing of connectivity, information, knowledge and power. You are already halfway invested in the cloud, whether or not you realize it. And that’s also true for people you serve, your customers and clients and interest groups. You can’t simply ignore the cloud.

How then should organizations proceed?

First recommendation: do not be scared of the cloud. It might be some time before you can come to love the cloud, or even trust it, but you must at least move to a place where you are not frightened by a constituency which uses the cloud to assert its own empowerment. Reacting out of fright will only lead to an arms race, a series of escalations where the your hierarchy attempts to contain the cloud, and the cloud – which is faster, smarter and more agile than you can ever hope to be – outwits you, again and again.

Second: like likes like. If you can permute your organization so that it looks more like the cloud, you’ll have an easier time working with the cloud. Case in point: because of ‘message discipline’, only a very few people are allowed to speak for an organization. Yet, because of the exponential growth in connectivity and Web2.0 technologies, everyone in your organization has more opportunities to speak for your organization than ever before. Can you release control over message discipline, and empower your organization to speak for itself, from any point of contact? Yes, this sounds dangerous, and yes, there are some dangers involved, but the cloud wants to be spoken to authentically, and authenticity has many competing voices, not a single monolithic tone.

Third, and finally, remember that we are all involved in a growth process. The cloud of last year is not the cloud of next year. The answers that satisfied a year ago are not the same answers that will satisfy a year from now. We are all booting up very quickly into an alternative form of social organization which is only just now spreading its wings and testing its worth. Beginnings are delicate times. The future will be shaped by actions in the present. This means there are enormous opportunities to extend the capabilities of existing organizations, simply by harnessing them to the changes underway. It also means that tragedies await those who fight the tide of times too single-mindedly. Our culture has already rounded the corner, and made the transition to the cloud. It remains to be seen which of our institutions and organizations can adapt themselves, and find their way forward into sharing power.

Keynote for the Digital Fair of the Australian College of Educators, Geelong Grammar School, 16 April 2009. The full text of the talk is here.

A spectre is haunting the classroom, the spectre of change. Nearly a century of institutional forms, initiated at the height of the Industrial Era, will change irrevocably over the next decade. The change is already well underway, but this change is not being led by teachers, administrators, parents or politicians. Coming from the ground up, the true agents of change are the students within the educational system. Within just the last five years, both power and control have swung so quickly and so completely in their favor that it’s all any of us can do to keep up. We live in an interregnum, between the shift in power and its full actualization: These wacky kids don’t yet realize how powerful they are.

This power shift does not have a single cause, nor could it be thwarted through any single change, to set the clock back to a more stable time. Instead, we are all participating in a broadly-based cultural transformation. The forces unleashed can not simply be dammed up; thus far they have swept aside every attempt to contain them. While some may be content to sit on the sidelines and wait until this cultural reorganization plays itself out, as educators you have no such luxury. Everything hits you first, and with full force. You are embedded within this change, as much so as this generation of students.

This paper outlines the basic features of this new world we are hurtling towards, pointing out the obvious rocks and shoals that we must avoid being thrown up against, collisions which could dash us to bits. It is a world where even the illusion of control has been torn away from us. A world wherein the first thing we need to recognize that what is called for in the classroom is a strategic détente, a détente based on mutual interest and respect. Without those two core qualities we have nothing, and chaos will drown all our hopes for worthwhile outcomes. These outcomes are not hard to achieve; one might say that any classroom which lacks mutual respect and interest is inevitably doomed to failure, no matter what the tenor of the times. But just now, in this time, it happens altogether more quickly.

Hence I come to the title of this talk, “Digital Citizenship”. We have given our children the Bomb, and they can – if they so choose – use it to wipe out life as we know it. Right now we sit uneasily in an era of mutually-assured destruction, all the more dangerous because these kids don’t now how fully empowered they are. They could pull the pin by accident. For this reason we must understand them, study them intently, like anthropologists doing field research with an undiscovered tribe. They are not the same as us. Unwittingly, we have changed the rules of the world for them. When the Superpowers stared each other down during the Cold War, each was comforted by the fact that each knew the other had essentially the same hopes and concerns underneath the patina of Capitalism or Communism. This time around, in this Cold War, we stare into eyes so alien they could be another form of life entirely. And this, I must repeat, is entirely our own doing. We have created the cultural preconditions for this Balance of Terror. It is up to us to create an environment that fosters respect, trust, and a new balance of powers. To do that first we must examine the nature of the tremendous changes which have fundamentally altered the way children think.

I: Primary Influences

I am a constructivist. Constructivism states (in terms that now seem fairly obvious) that children learn the rules of the world from their repeated interactions within in. Children build schema, which are then put to the test through experiment; if these experiments succeed, those schema are incorporated into ever-larger schema, but if they fail, it’s back to the drawing board to create new schema. This all seems straightforward enough – even though Einstein pronounced it, “An idea so simple only a genius could have thought of it.” That genius, Jean Piaget, remains an overarching influence across the entire field of childhood development.

At the end of the last decade I became intensely aware that the rapid technological transformations of the past generation must necessarily impact upon the world views of children. At just the time my ideas were gestating, I was privileged to attend a presentation given by Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and perhaps the most subtle thinker in the area of children and technology. Turkle talked about her current research, which involved a recently-released and fantastically popular children’s toy, the Furby.

For those of you who may have missed the craze, the Furby is an animatronic creature which has expressive eyes, touch sensors, and a modest capability with language. When first powered up, the Furby speaks ‘Furbish’, an artificial language which the child can decode by looking up words in a dictionary booklet included in the package. As the child interacts with the toy, the Furby’s language slowly adopts more and more English prhases. All of this is interesting enough, but more interesting, by far, is that the Furby has needs. Furby must be fed and played with. Furby must rest and sleep after a session of play. All of this gives the Furby some attributes normally associated with living things, and this gave Turkle an idea.

Constructivists had already determined that between ages four and six children learn to differentiate between animate objects, such as a pet dog, and inanimate objects, such as a doll. Since Furby showed qualities which placed it into both ontological categories, Turkle wondered whether children would class it as animate or inanimate. What she discovered during her interviews with these children astounded her. When the question was put to them of whether the Furby was animate or inanimate, the children said, “Neither.” The children intuited that the Furby resided in a new ontological class of objects, between the animate and inanimate. It’s exactly this ontological in-between-ness of Furby which causes some adults to find them “creepy”. We don’t have a convenient slot to place them into our own world views, and therefore reject them as alien. But Furby was completely natural to these children. Even the invention of a new ontological class of being-ness didn’t strain their understanding. It was, to them, simply the way the world works.

Writ large, the Furby tells the story of our entire civilization. We make much of the difference between “digital immigrants”, such as ourselves, and “digital natives”, such as these children. These kids are entirely comfortable within the digital world, having never known anything else. We casually assume that this difference is merely a quantitative facility. In fact, the difference is almost entirely qualitative. The schema upon which their world-views are based, the literal ‘rules of their world’, are completely different. Furby has an interiority hitherto only ascribed to living things, and while it may not make the full measure of a living thing, it is nevertheless somewhere on a spectrum that simply did not exist a generation ago. It is a magical object, sprinkled with the pixie dust of interactivity, come partially to life, and closer to a real-world Pinocchio than we adults would care to acknowledge.

If Furby were the only example of this transformation of the material world, we would be able to easily cope with the changes in the way children think. It was, instead, part of a leading edge of a breadth of transformation. For example, when I was growing up, LEGO bricks were simple, inanimate objects which could be assembled in an infinite arrangement of forms. Today, LEGO Mindstorms allow children to create programmable forms, using wheels and gears and belts and motors and sensors. LEGO is no longer passive, but active and capable of interacting with the child. It, too, has acquired an interiority which teaches children that at some essential level the entire material world is poised at the threshold of a transformation into the active. A child playing with LEGO Mindstorms will never see the material world as wholly inanimate; they will see it as a playground requiring little more than a few simple mechanical additions, plus a sprinkling of code, to bring it to life. Furby adds interiority to the inanimate world, but LEGO Mindstorms empowers the child with the ability to add this interiority themselves.

The most significant of these transformational innovations is one of the most recent. In 2004, Google purchased Keyhole, Inc., a company that specialized in geospatial data visualization tools. A year later Google released the first version of Google Earth, a tool which provides a desktop environment wherein the entire Earth’s surface can be browsed, at varying levels of resolution, from high Earth orbit, down to the level of storefronts, anywhere throughout the world. This tool, both free and flexible, has fomented a revolution in the teaching of geography, history and political science. No longer constrained to the archaic Mercator Projection atlas on the wall, or the static globe-as-a-ball perched on one corner of teacher’s desk, Google Earth presents Earth-as-a-snapshot.

We must step back and ask ourselves the qualitative lesson, the constructivist message of Google Earth. Certainly it removes the problem of scale; the child can see the world from any point of view, even multiple points of view simultaneously. But it also teaches them that ‘to observe is to understand’. A child can view the ever-expanding drying of southern Australia along with a data showing the rise in temperature over the past decade, all laid out across the continent. The Earth becomes a chalkboard, a spreadsheet, a presentation medium, where the thorny problems of global civilization and its discontents can be explored out in exquisite detail. In this sense, no problem, no matter how vast, no matter how global, will be seen as being beyond the reach of these children. They’ll learn this – not because of what teacher says, or what homework assignments they complete – through interaction with the technology itself.

The generation of children raised on Google Earth will graduate from secondary schools in 2017, just at the time the Government plans to complete its rollout of the National Broadband Network. I reckon these two tools will go hand-in-hand: broadband connects the home to the world, while Google Earth brings the world into the home. Australians, particularly beset by the problems of global warming, climate, and environmental management, need the best tools and the best minds to solve the problems which already beset us. Fortunately it looks as though we are training a generation for leadership, using the tools already at hand.

The existence of Google Earth as an interactive object changes the child’s relationship to the planet. A simulation of Earth is a profoundly new thing, and naturally is generating new ontological categories. Yet again, and completely by accident, we have profoundly altered the world view of this generation of children and young adults. We are doing this to ourselves: our industries turn out products and toys and games which apply the latest technological developments in a dazzling variety of ways. We give these objects to our children, more or less blindly unaware of how this will affect their development. Then we wonder how these aliens arrived in our midst, these ‘digital natives’ with their curious ways. Ladies and gentlemen, we need to admit that we have done this to ourselves. We and our technological-materialist culture have fostered an environment of such tremendous novelty and variety that we have changed the equations of childhood.

Yet these technologies are only the tip of the iceberg. Each are the technologies of childhood, of a world of objects, where the relationship is between child and object. This is not the world of adults, where the relations between objects are thoroughly confused by the relationships between adults. In fact, it can be said that for as much as adults are obsessed with material possessions, we are only obsessed with them because of our relationships to other adults. The corner we turn between childhood and young adulthood is indicative of a change in the way we think, in the objects of attention, and in the technologies which facilitate and amplify that attention. These technologies have also suddenly and profoundly changed, and, again, we are almost completely unaware of what that has done to those wacky kids.

II: Share This Thought!

Australia now has more mobile phone subscribers than people. We have reached 104% subscription levels, simply because some of us own and use more than one handset. This phenomenon has been repeated globally; there are something like four billion mobile phone subscribers throughout the world, representing approximately three point six billion customers. That’s well over half the population of planet Earth. Given that there are only about a billion people in the ‘advanced’ economies in the developed world – almost all of whom now use mobiles – two and a half billion of the relatively ‘poor’ also have mobiles. How could this be? Shouldn’t these people be spending money on food, housing, and education for their children?

As it turns out (and there are numerous examples to support this) a mobile handset is probably the most important tool someone can employ to improve their economic well-being. A farmer can call ahead to markets to find out which is paying the best price for his crop; the same goes for fishermen. Tradesmen can close deals without the hassle and lost time involved in travel; craftswomen can coordinate their creative resources with a few text messages. Each of these examples can be found in any Bangladeshi city or Africa village. In the developed world, the mobile was nice but non-essential: no one is late anymore, just delayed, because we can always phone ahead. In the parts of the world which never had wired communications, the leap into the network has been explosively potent.

The mobile is a social accelerant; it does for our innate social capabilities what the steam shovel did for our mechanical capabilities two hundred years ago. The mobile extends our social reach, and deepens our social connectivity. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the lives of those wacky kids. At the beginning of this decade, researcher Mitzuko Ito took a look at the mobile phone in the lives of Japanese teenagers. Ito published her research in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, presenting a surprising result: these teenagers were sending and receiving a hundred text messages a day among a close-knit group of friends (generally four or five others), starting when they first arose in the morning, and going on until they fell asleep at night. This constant, gentle connectivity – which Ito named ‘co-presence’ – often consisted of little of substance, just reminders of connection.

At the time many of Ito’s readers dismissed this phenomenon as something to be found among those ‘wacky Japanese’, with their technophilic bent. A decade later this co-presence is the standard behavior for all teenagers everywhere in the developed world. An Australian teenager thinks nothing of sending and receiving a hundred text messages a day, within their own close group of friends. A parent who might dare to look at the message log on a teenager’s phone would see very little of significance and wonder why these messages needed to be sent at all. But the content doesn’t matter: connection is the significant factor.

We now know that the teenage years are when the brain ‘boots’ into its full social awareness, when children leave childhood behind to become fully participating members within the richness of human society. This process has always been painful and awkward, but just now, with the addition of the social accelerant and amplifier of the mobile, it has become almost impossibly significant. The co-present social network can help cushion the blow of rejection, or it can impel the teenager to greater acts of folly. Both sides of the technology-as-amplifier are ever-present. We have seen bullying by mobile and over YouTube or Facebook; we know how quickly the technology can overrun any of the natural instincts which might prevent us from causing damage far beyond our intention – keep this in mind, because we’ll come back to it when we discuss digital citizenship in detail.

There is another side to sociability, both far removed from this bullying behavior and intimately related to it – the desire to share. The sharing of information is an innate human behavior: since we learned to speak we’ve been talking to each other, warning each other of dangers, informing each other of opportunities, positing possibilities, and just generally reassuring each other with the sound of our voices. We’ve now extended that four-billion-fold, so that half of humanity is directly connected, one to another.

We know we say little to nothing with those we know well, though we may say it continuously. What do we say to those we know not at all? In this case we share not words but the artifacts of culture. We share a song, or a video clip, or a link, or a photograph. Each of these are just as important as words spoken, but each of these places us at a comfortable distance within the intimate act of sharing. 21st-century culture looks like a gigantic act of sharing. We share music, movies and television programmes, driving the creative industries to distraction – particularly with the younger generation, who see no need to pay for any cultural product. We share information and knowledge, creating a wealth of blogs, and resources such as Wikipedia, the universal repository of factual information about the world as it is. We share the minutiae of our lives in micro-blogging services such as Twitter, and find that, being so well connected, we can also harvest the knowledge of our networks to become ever-better informed, and ever more effective individuals. We can translate that effectiveness into action, and become potent forces for change.

Everything we do, both within and outside the classroom, must be seen through this prism of sharing. Teenagers log onto video chat services such as Skype, and do their homework together, at a distance, sharing and comparing their results. Parents offer up their kindergartener’s presentations to other parents through Twitter – and those parents respond to the offer. All of this both amplifies and undermines the classroom. The classroom has not dealt with the phenomenal transformation in the connectivity of the broader culture, and is in danger of becoming obsolesced by it.

Yet if the classroom were to wholeheartedly to embrace connectivity, what would become of it? Would it simply dissolve into a chaotic sea, or is it strong enough to chart its own course in this new world? This same question confronts every institution, of every size. It affects the classroom first simply because the networked and co-present polity of hyperconnected teenagers has reached it first. It is the first institution that must transform because the young adults who are its reason for being are the agents of that transformation. There’s no way around it, no way to set the clock back to a simpler time, unless, Amish-like, we were simply to dispose of all the gadgets which we have adopted as essential elements in our lifestyle.

This, then, is why these children hold the future of the classroom-as-institution in their hands, this is why the power-shift has been so sudden and so complete. This is why digital citizenship isn’t simply an academic interest, but a clear and present problem which must be addressed, broadly and immediately, throughout our entire educational system. We already live in a time of disconnect, where the classroom has stopped reflecting the world outside its walls. The classroom is born of an industrial mode of thinking, where hierarchy and reproducibility were the order of the day. The world outside those walls is networked and highly heterogeneous. And where the classroom touches the world outside, sparks fly; the classroom can’t handle the currents generated by the culture of connectivity and sharing. This can not go on.

When discussing digital citizenship, we must first look to ourselves. This is more than a question of learning the language and tools of the digital era, we must take the life-skills we have already gained outside the classroom and bring them within. But beyond this, we must relentlessly apply network logic to the work of our own lives. If that work is as educators, so be it. We must accept the reality of the 21st century, that, more than anything else, this is the networked era, and that this network has gifted us with new capabilities even as it presents us with new dangers. Both gifts and dangers are issues of potency; the network has made us incredibly powerful. The network is smarter, faster and more agile than the hierarchy; when the two collide – as they’re bound to, with increasing frequency – the network always wins. A text message can unleash revolution, or land a teenager in jail on charges of peddling child pornography, or spark a riot on a Sydney beach; Wikipedia can drive Britannica, a quarter millennium-old reference text out of business; a outsider candidate can get himself elected president of the United States because his team masters the logic of the network. In truth, we already live in the age of digital citizenship, but so many of us don’t know the rules, and hence, are poor citizens.

Now that we’ve explored the dimensions of the transition in the understanding of the younger generation, and the desynchronization of our own practice within the world as it exists, we can finally tackle the issue of digital citizenship. Children and young adults who have grown up in this brave new world, who have already created new ontological categories to frame it in their understanding, won’t have time or attention for preaching and screeching from the pulpit in the classroom, or the ‘bully pulpits’ of the media. In some ways, their understanding already surpasses ours, but their apprehension of consequential behavior does not. It is entirely up to us to bridge this gap in their understanding, but I do not to imply that educators can handle this task alone. All of the adult forces of the culture must be involved: parents, caretakers, educators, administrators, mentors, authority and institutional figures of all kinds. We must all be pulling in the same direction, lest the threads we are trying to weave together unravel.

III: 20/60 Foresight

While on a lecture tour last year, a Queensland teacher said something quite profound to me. “Giving a year 7 student a laptop is the equivalent of giving them a loaded gun.” Just as we wouldn’t think of giving this child a gun without extensive safety instruction, we can’t even think consider giving this child a computer – and access to the network – without extensive training in digital citizenship. But the laptop is only one device; any networked device has the potential for the same pitfalls.

Long before Sherry Turkle explored Furby’s effect on the world-view of children, she examined how children interact with computers. In her first survey, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, she applied Lacanian psychoanalysis and constructivism to build a model of how children interacted with computers. In the earliest days of the personal computer revolution, these machines were not connected to any networks, but were instead laboratories where the child could explore themselves, creating a ‘mirror’ of their own understanding.

Now that almost every computer is fully connected to the billion-plus regular users of the Internet, the mirror no longer reflects the self, but the collective yet highly heterogeneous tastes and behaviors of mankind. The opportunity for quiet self-exploration drowns amidst the clamor from a very vital human world. In the space between the singular and the collective, we must provide an opportunity for children to grow into a sense of themselves, their capabilities, and their responsibilities. This liminal moment is the space for an education in digital citizenship. It may be the only space available for such an education, before the lure of the network sets behavioral patterns in place.

Children must be raised to have a healthy respect for the network from their earliest awareness of it. The network access of young children is generally closely supervised, but, as they turn the corner into tweenage and secondary education, we need to provide another level of support, which fully briefs these rapidly maturing children on the dangers, pitfalls, opportunities and strengths of network culture. They already know how to do things, but they do not have the wisdom to decide when it appropriate to do them, and when it is appropriate to refrain. That wisdom is the core of what must be passed along. But wisdom is hard to transmit in words; it must flow from actions and lessons learned. Is it possible to develop a lesson plan which imparts the lessons of digital citizenship? Can we teach these children to tame their new powers?

Before a child is given their own mobile – something that happens around age 12 here in Australia, though that is slowly dropping – they must learn the right way to use it. Not the perfunctory ‘this is not a toy’ talk they might receive from a parent, but a more subtle and profound exploration of what it means to be directly connected to half of humanity, and how, should that connectivity go awry, it could seriously affect someone’s life – possibly even their own. Yes, the younger generation has different values where the privacy of personal information is concerned, but even they have limits they want to respect, and circles of intimacy they want to defend. Showing them how to reinforce their privacy with technology is a good place to start in any discussion of digital citizenship.

Similarly, before a child is given a computer – either at home or in school – it must be accompanied by instruction in the power of the network. A child may have a natural facility with the network without having any sense of the power of the network as an amplifier of capability. It’s that disconnect which digital citizenship must bridge.

It’s not my role to be prescriptive. I’m not going to tell you to do this or that particular thing, or outline a five-step plan to ensure that the next generation avoid ruining their lives as they come online. This is a collective problem which calls for a collective solution. Fortunately, we live in an era of collective technology. It is possible for all of us to come together and collaborate on solutions to this problem. Digital citizenship is a issue which has global reach; the UK and the US are both confronting similar issues, and both, like Australia, fail to deal with them comprehensively. Perhaps the Australian College of Educators can act as a spearhead on this issue, working in concert with other national bodies to develop a program and curriculum in digital citizenship. It would be a project worthy of your next fifty years.

In closing, let’s cast our eyes forward fifty years, to 2060, when your organization will be celebrating its hundredth anniversary. We can only imagine the technological advances of the next fifty years in the fuzziest of terms. You need only cast yourselves back fifty years to understand why. Back then, a computer as powerful as my laptop wouldn’t have filled a single building – or even a single city block. It very likely would have filled a small city, requiring its own power plant. If we have come so far in fifty years, judging where we’ll be in fifty years time is beyond the capabilities of even the most able futurist. We can only say that computers will become pervasive and nearly invisibly woven through the fabric of human culture.

Let us instead focus on how we will use technology in fifty years’ time. We can already see the shape of the future in one outstanding example – a website known as RateMyProfessors.com. Here, in a database of nine million reviews of one million teachers, lecturers and professors, students can learn which instructors bore, which grade easily, which excite the mind, and so forth. This simple site – which grew out of the power of sharing – has radically changed the balance of power on university campuses throughout the US and the UK. Students can learn from others’ mistakes or triumphs, and can repeat them. Universities, which might try to corral students into lectures with instructors who might not be exemplars of their profession, find themselves unable to fill those courses. Worse yet, bidding wars have broken out between universities seeking to fill their ranks with the instructors who receive the highest rankings.

Alongside the rise of RateMyProfessors.com, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of lecture material you can find online, whether on YouTube, or iTunes University, or any number of dedicated websites. Those lectures also have ratings, so it is already possible for a student to get to the best and most popular lectures on any subject, be it calculus or Mandarin or the medieval history of Europe.

Both of these trends are accelerating because both are backed by the power of sharing, the engine driving all of this. As we move further into the future, we’ll see the students gradually take control of the scheduling functions of the university (and probably in a large number of secondary school classes). These students will pair lecturers with courses using software to coordinate both. More and more, the educational institution will be reduced to a layer of software sitting between the student, the mentor-instructor and the courseware. As the university dissolves in the universal solvent of the network, the capacity to use the network for education increases geometrically; education will be available everywhere the network reaches. It already reaches half of humanity; in a few years it will cover three-quarters of the population of the planet. Certainly by 2060 network access will be thought of as a human right, much like food and clean water.

In 2060, Australian College of Educators may be more of an ‘Invisible College’ than anything based in rude physicality. Educators will continue to collaborate, but without much of the physical infrastructure we currently associate with educational institutions. Classrooms will self-organize and disperse organically, driven by need, proximity, or interest, and the best instructors will find themselves constantly in demand. Life-long learning will no longer be a catch-phrase, but a reality for the billions of individuals all focusing on improving their effectiveness within an ever-more-competitive global market for talent. (The same techniques employed by RateMyProfessors.com will impact all the other professions, eventually.)

There you have it. The human future is both more chaotic and more potent than we can easily imagine, even if we have examples in our present which point the way to where we are going. And if this future sounds far away, keep this in mind: today’s year 10 student will be retiring in 2060. This is their world.

My annual lecture to the “Cyberworlds” class at the University of Sydney. Recorded on 31 March 2009.

I have to admit that I am in awe of iTunes University. It’s just amazing that so many well-respected universities – Stanford, MIT, Yale, and Uni Melbourne – are willing to put their crown jewels – their lectures – online for everyone to download. It’s outstanding when even one school provides a wealth of material, but as other schools provide their own material, then we get to see some of the virtues of crowdsourcing. First, you have a virtuous cycle: as more material is shared, more material will be made available to share. After the virtuous cycle gets going, it’s all about a flight to quality.

When you have half a dozen or have a hundred lectures on calculus, which one do you choose? The one featuring the best lecturer with the best presentation skills, the best examples, and the best math jokes – of course. This is my only complaint with iTunes University – you can’t rate the various lectures on offer. You can know which ones have been downloaded most often, but that’s not precisely the same thing as which calculus seminar or which sociology lecture is the best. So as much as I love iTunes University, I see it as halfway there. Perhaps Apple didn’t want to turn iTunes U into a popularity contest, but, without that vital bit of feedback, it’s nearly impossible for us to winnow out the wheat from the educational chaff.

This is something that has to happen inside the system; it could happen across a thousand educational blogs spread out across the Web, but then it’s too diffuse to be really helpful. The reviews have to be coordinated and collated – just as with RateMyProfessors.com.

Say, that’s an interesting point. Why not create RateMyLectures.com, a website designed to sit right alongside iTunes University? If Apple can’t or won’t rate their offerings, someone has to create the one-stop-shop for ratings. And as iTunes University gets bigger and bigger, RateMyLectures.com becomes ever more important, the ultimate guide to the ultimate source of educational multimedia on the Internet. One needs the other to be wholly useful; without ratings iTunes U is just an undifferentiated pile of possibilities. But with ratings, iTunes U becomes a highly focused and effective tool for digital education.

Now let’s cast our minds ahead a few semesters: iTunes U is bigger and better than ever, and RateMyLectures.com has benefited from the hundreds of thousands of contributed reviews. Those reviews extend beyond the content in iTunes U, out into YouTube and Google Video and Vimeo and Blip.tv and where ever people are creating lectures and putting them online. Now anyone can come by the site and discover the absolute best lecture on almost any subject they care to research. The net is now cast globally; I can search for the best lecture on Earth, so long as it’s been captured and uploaded somewhere, and someone’s rated it on RateMyLectures.com.

All of a sudden we’ve imploded the boundaries of the classroom. The lecture can come from the US, or the UK, or Canada, or New Zealand, or any other country. Location doesn’t matter – only its rating as ‘best’ matters. This means that every student, every time they sit down at a computer, already does or will soon have on available the absolute best lectures, globally. That’s just a mind-blowing fact. It grows very naturally out of our desire to share and our desire to share ratings about what we have shared. Nothing extraordinary needed to happen to produce this entirely extraordinary state of affairs.

The network is acting like a universal solvent, dissolving all of the boundaries that have kept things separate. It’s not just dissolving the boundaries of distance – though it is doing that – it’s also dissolving the boundaries of preference. Although there will always be differences in taste and delivery, some instructors are simply better lecturers – in better command of their material – than others. Those instructors will rise to the top. Just as RateMyProfessors.com has created a global market for the lecturers with the highest ratings, RateMyLectures.com will create a global market for the best performances, the best material, the best lessons.

That RateMyLectures.com is only a hypothetical shouldn’t put you off. Part of what’s happening at this inflection point is that we’re all collectively learning how to harness the network for intelligence augmentation – Engelbart’s final triumph. All we need do is identify an area which could benefit from knowledge sharing and, sooner rather than later, someone will come along with a solution. I’d actually be very surprised if a service a lot like RateMyLectures.com doesn’t already exist. It may be small and unimpressive now. But Wikipedia was once small and unimpressive. If it’s useful, it will likely grow large enough to be successful.

Of course, lectures alone do not an education make. Lectures are necessary but are only one part of the educational process. Mentoring and problem solving and answering questions: all of these take place in the very real, very physical classroom. The best lectures in the world are only part of the story. The network is also transforming the classroom, from inside out, melting it down, and forging it into something that looks quite a bit different from the classroom we’ve grown familiar with over the last 50 years.

II: Fluid Dynamics

If we take the examples of RateMyProfessors.com and RateMyLectures.com and push them out a little bit, we can see the shape of things to come. Spearheaded by Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of which have placed their entire set of lectures online through iTunes University, these educational institutions assert that the lectures themselves aren’t the real reason students spend $50,000 a year to attend these schools; the lectures only have full value in context. This is true, but it discounts the possibility that some individuals or group of individuals might create their own context around the lectures. And this is where the future seems to be pointing.

When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?

At the moment the educational institution has an advantage over the singular student, in that it exists to coordinate the various functions of education. The student doesn’t have access to the same facilities or coordination tools. But we already see that this is changing; RateMyProfessors.com points the way. Why not create a new kind of “Open” school, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses? I’m sure that if this hasn’t been invented already someone is currently working on it – it’s the natural outgrowth of all the efforts toward student empowerment we’ve seen over the last several years.

In this near future world, students are the administrators. All of the administrative functions have been “pushed down” into a substrate of software. Education has evolved into something like a marketplace, where instructors “bid” to work with students. Now since most education is funded by the government, there will obviously be other forces at play; it may be that “administration”, such as it is, represents the government oversight function which ensures standards are being met. In any case, this does not look much like the educational institution of the 20th century – though it does look quite a bit like the university of the 13th century, where students would find and hire instructors to teach them subjects.

The role of the instructor has changed as well; as recently as a few years ago the lecturer was the font of wisdom and source of all knowledge – perhaps with a companion textbook. In an age of Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter this no longer the case. The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructors facilitate and mentor, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers, anywhere.

The administration has gone, the instructor’s role has evolved, now what happens to the classroom itself? In the context of a larger school facility, it may or may not be relevant. A classroom is clearly relevant if someone is learning engine repair, but perhaps not if learning calculus. The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens. If it can happen entirely online, that will be the classroom. If it requires substantial presence with the instructor, it will have a physical locale, which may or may not be a building dedicated to education. (It could, in many cases, simply be a field outdoors, again harkening back to 13th-century university practices.) At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode, vanishing online, and explode: the world will become the classroom.

This, then, can already be predicted from current trends; as the network begins to destabilizing the institutional hierarchies in education, everything else becomes inevitable. Because this transformation lies mostly in the future, it is possible to shape these trends with actions taken in the present. In the worst case scenario, our educational institutions to not adjust to the pressures placed upon them by this new generation of students, and are simply swept aside by these students as they rise into self-empowerment. But the worst case need not be the only case. There are concrete steps which institutions can take to ease the transition from our highly formal present into our wildly informal future. In order to roll with the punches delivered by these newly-empowered students, educational institutions must become more fluid, more open, more atomic, and less interested the hallowed traditions of education than in outcomes.

III: Digital Citizenship

Obviously, much of what I’ve described here in the “melting down” of the educational process applies first and foremost to university students. That’s where most of the activity is taking place. But I would argue that it only begins with university students. From there – just like Facebook – it spreads across the gap between tertiary and secondary education, and into the high schools and colleges.

This is significant an interesting because it’s at this point that we, within Australia, run headlong into the Government’s plan to provide laptops for all year 9 through year 12 students. Some schools will start earlier; there’s a general consensus among educators that year 7 is the earliest time a student should be trusted to behave responsibility with their “own” computer. Either way, the students will be fully equipped and capable to use all of the tools at hand to manage their own education.

But will they? Some of this is a simple question of discipline: will the students be disciplined enough to take an ever-more-active role in the co-production of their education? As ever, the question is neither black nor white; some students will demonstrate the qualities of discipline needed to allow them to assume responsibility for their education, while others will not.

But, somewhere along here, there’s the presumption of some magical moment during the secondary school years, when the student suddenly learns how to behave online. And we already know this isn’t happening. We see too many incidents where students make mistakes, behaving badly without fully understanding that the whole world really is watching.

In the early part of this year I did a speaking tour with the Australian Council of Educational Researchers; during the tour I did a lot of listening. One thing I heard loud and clear from the educators is that giving a year 7 student a laptop is the functional equivalent of giving them a loaded gun. And we shouldn’t be surprised, when we do this, when there are a few accidental – or volitional – shootings.

I mentioned this in a talk to TAFE educators last week, and one of the attendees suggested that we needed to teach “Digital Citizenship”. I’d never heard the phrase before, but I’ve taken quite a liking to it. Of course, by the time a student gets to TAFE, the damage is done. We shouldn’t start talking about digital citizenship in TAFE. We should be talking about it from the first days of secondary education. And it’s not something that should be confined to the school: parents are on the hook for this, too. Even when the parents are not digitally literate, they can impart the moral and ethical lessons of good behavior to their children, lessons which will transfer to online behavior.

Make no mistake, without a firm grounding in digital citizenship, a secondary student can’t hope to make sense of the incredibly rich and impossibly distracting world afforded by the network. Unless we turn down the internet connection – which always seems like the first option taken by administrators – students will find themselves overwhelmed. That’s not surprising: we’ve taught them few skills to help them harness the incredible wealth available. In part that’s because we’re only just learning those skills ourselves. But in part it’s because we would have to relinquish control. We’re reluctant to do that. A course in digital citizenship would help both students and teachers feel more at ease with one another when confronted by the noise online.

Make no mistake, this inflection point in education is going inevitably going to cross the gap between tertiary and secondary school and students. Students will be able to do for themselves in ways that were never possible before. None of this means that the teacher or even the administrator has necessarily become obsolete. But the secondary school of the mid-21st century may look a lot more like a website than campus. The classroom will have a fluid look, driven by the teacher, the students and the subject material.

Have we prepared students for this world? Have we given them the ability to make wise decisions about their own education? Or are we like those university administrators who mutter about how RateMyProfessors.com has ruined all their carefully-laid plans? The world where students were simply the passive consumers of an educational product is coming to an end. There are other products out there, clamoring for attention – you can thank Apple for that. And YouTube.

Once we get through this inflection point in the digital revolution in education, we arrive in a landscape that’s literally mind-blowing. We will each have access to educational resources far beyond anything on offer at any other time in human history. The dream of life-long learning will be simply a few clicks away for most of the billion people on the Internet, and many of the four billion who use mobiles. It will not be an easy transition, nor will it be perfect on the other side. But it will be incredible, a validation of everything Douglas Engelbart demonstrated forty years ago, and an opportunity to create a truly global educational culture, focused on excellence, and dedicated to serving all students, everywhere.

Today is a very important day in the annals of computer science. It’s the anniversary of the most famous technology demo ever given. Not, as you might expect, the first public demonstration of the Macintosh (which happened in January 1984), but something far older and far more important. Forty years ago today, December 9th, 1968, in San Francisco, a small gathering of computer specialists came together to get their first glimpse of the future of computing. Of course, they didn’t know that the entire future of computing would emanate from this one demo, but the next forty years would prove that point.

The maestro behind the demo – leading a team of developers – was Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart was a wunderkind from SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, a think-tank spun out from Stanford University to collaborate with various moneyed customers – such as the US military – on future technologies. Of all the futurist technologists, Engelbart was the future-i-est.

In the middle of the 1960s, Engelbart had come to an uncomfortable realization: human culture was growing progressively more complex, while human intelligence stayed within the same comfortable range we’d known for thousands of years. In short order, Engelbart assessed, our civilization would start to collapse from its own complexity. The solution, Engelbart believed, would come from tools that could augment human intelligence. Create tools to make men smarter, and you’d be able to avoid the inevitable chaotic crash of an overcomplicated civilization.

To this end – and with healthy funding from both NASA and DARPA – Engelbart began work on the Online System, or NLS. The first problem in intelligence augmentation: how do you make a human being smarter? The answer: pair humans up with other humans. In other words, networking human beings together could increase the intelligence of every human being in the network. The NLS wasn’t just the online system, it was the networked system. Every NLS user could share resources and documents with other users. This meant NLS users would need to manage these resources in the system, so they needed high-quality computer screens, and a windowing system to keep the information separated. They needed an interface device to manage the windows of information, so Engelbart invented something he called a ‘mouse’.

I’ll jump to the chase: that roomful of academics at the Fall Joint Computer Conference saw the first broadly networked system featuring raster displays – the forerunner of all displays in use today; windowing; manipulation of on-screen information using a mouse; document storage and manipulation using the first hypertext system ever demonstrated, and videoconferencing between Engelbart, demoing in San Francisco, and his colleagues 30 miles away in Menlo Park.

In other words, in just one demo, Engelbart managed to completely encapsulate absolutely everything we’ve been working toward with computers over the last 40 years. The NLS was easily 20 years ahead of its time, but its influence is so pervasive, so profound, so dominating, that it has shaped nearly every major problem in human-computer interface design since its introduction. We have all been living in Engelbart’s shadow, basically just filling out the details in his original grand mission.

Of all the technologies rolled into the NLS demo, hypertext has arguably had the most profound impact. Known as the “Journal” on NLS, it allowed all the NLS users to collaboratively edit or view any of the documents in the NLS system. It was the first groupware application, the first collaborative application, the first wiki application. And all of this more than 20 years before the Web came into being. To Engelbart, the idea of networked computers and hypertext went hand-in-hand; they were indivisible, absolutely essential components of an online system.

It’s interesting to note that although the Internet has been around since 1969 – nearly as long as the NLS – it didn’t take off until the advent of a hypertext system – the World Wide Web. A network is mostly useless without a hypermedia system sitting on top of it, and multiplying its effectiveness. By itself a network is nice, but insufficient.

So, more than can be said for any other single individual in the field of computer science, we find ourselves living in the world that Douglas Engelbart created. We use computers with raster displays and manipulate windows of hypertext information using mice. We use tools like video conferencing to share knowledge. We augment our own intelligence by turning to others.

That’s why the “Mother of All Demos,” as it’s known today, is probably the most important anniversary in all of computer science. It set the stage the world we live in, more so that we recognized even a few years ago. You see, one part of Engelbart’s revolution took rather longer to play out. This last innovation of Engelbart’s is only just beginning.

II: Share and Share Alike

In January 2002, Oregon State University, the alma mater of Douglas Engelbart, decided to host a celebration of his life and work. I was fortunate enough to be invited to OSU to give a talk about hypertext and knowledge augmentation, an interest of mine and a persistent theme of my research. Not only did I get to meet the man himself (quite an honor), I got to meet some of the other researchers who were picking up where Engelbart had left off. After I walked off stage, following my presentation, one of the other researchers leaned over to me and asked, “Have you heard of Wikipedia?”

I had not. This is hardly surprising; in January 2002 Wikipedia was only about a year old, and had all of 14,000 articles – about the same number as a children’s encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britannica, though it had put itself behind a “paywall,” had over a hundred thousand quality articles available online. Wikipedia wasn’t about to compete with Britannica. At least, that’s what I thought.

It turns out that I couldn’t have been more wrong. Over the next few months – as Wikipedia approached 30,000 articles in English – an inflection point was reached, and Wikipedia started to grow explosively. In retrospect, what happened was this: people would drop by Wikipedia, and if they liked what they saw, they’d tell others about Wikipedia, and perhaps make a contribution. But they first had to like what they saw, and that wouldn’t happen without a sufficient number of articles, a sort of “critical mass” of information. While Wikipedia stayed beneath that critical mass it remained a toy, a plaything; once it crossed that boundary it became a force of nature, gradually then rapidly sucking up the collected knowledge of the human species, putting it into a vast, transparent and freely accessible collection. Wikipedia thrived inside a virtuous cycle where more visitors meant more contributors, which meant more visitors, which meant more contributors, and so on, endlessly, until – as of this writing, there are 2.65 million articles in the English language in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s biggest problem today isn’t attracting contributions, it’s winnowing the wheat from the chaff. Wikipedia has constant internal debates about whether a subject is important enough to deserve an entry in its own right; whether this person has achieved sufficient standards of notability to merit a biographical entry; whether this exploration of a fictional character in a fictional universe belongs in Wikipedia at all, or might be better situated within a dedicated fan wiki. Wikipedia’s success has been proven beyond all doubt; managing that success is the task of the day.

While we all rely upon Wikipedia more and more, we haven’t really given much thought as to what Wikipedia gives us. At its most basically level, Wikipedia gives us high-quality factual information. Within its major subject areas, Wikipedia’s veracity is unimpeachable, and has been put to the test by publications such as Nature. But what do these high-quality facts give us? The ability to make better decisions.

Given that we try to make decisions about our lives based on the best available information, the better that information is, the better our decisions will be. This seems obvious when spelled out like this, but it’s something we never credit Wikipedia with. We think about being able to answer trivia questions or research topics of current fascination, but we never think that every time we use Wikipedia to make a decision, we are improving our decision making ability. We are improving our own lives.

This is Engelbart’s final victory. When I met him in 2002, he seemed mostly depressed by the advent of the Web. At that time – pre-Wikipedia, pre-Web2.0 – the Web was mostly thought of as a publishing medium, not as something that would allow the multi-way exchange of ideas. Engelbart has known for forty years that sharing information is the cornerstone to intelligence augmentation. And in 2002 there wasn’t a whole lot of sharing going on.

It’s hard to imagine the Web of 2002 from our current vantage point. Today, when we think about the Web, we think about sharing, first and foremost. The web is a sharing medium. There’s still quite a bit of publishing going on, but that seems almost an afterthought, the appetizer before the main course. I’d have to imagine that this is pleasing Engelbart immensely, as we move ever closer to the models he pioneered forty years ago. It’s taken some time for the world to catch up with his vision, but now we seem to have a tool fit for knowledge augmentation. And Wikipedia is really only one example of the many tools we have available for knowledge augmentation. Every sharing tool – Digg, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, and so on – provides an equal opportunity to share and to learn from what others have shared. We can pool our resources more effectively than at any other time in history.

The question isn’t, “Can we do it?” The question is, “What do we want to do?” How do we want to increase our intelligence and effectiveness through sharing?

III: Crowdsource Yourself

Now we come to all of you, here together for three days, to teach and to learn, to practice and to preach. Most of you are the leaders in your particular schools and institutions. Most of you have gone way out on the digital limb, far ahead of your peers. Which means you’re alone. And it’s not easy being alone. Pioneers can always be identified by the arrows in their backs.

So I have a simple proposal to put to you: these three days aren’t simply an opportunity to bring yourselves up to speed on the latest digital wizardry, they’re a chance to increase your intelligence and effectiveness, through sharing.

All of you, here today, know a huge amount about what works and what doesn’t, about curricula and teaching standards, about administration and bureaucracy. This is hard-won knowledge, gained on the battlefields of your respective institutions. Now just imagine how much it could benefit all of us if we shared it, one with another. This is the sort of thing that happens naturally and casually at a forum like this: a group of people will get to talking, and, sooner or later, all of the battle stories come out. Like old Diggers talking about the war.

I’m asking you to think about this casual process a bit more formally: How can you use the tools on offer to capture and share everything you’ve learned? If you don’t capture it, it can’t be shared. If you don’t share it, it won’t add to our intelligence. So, as you’re learning how to podcast or blog or setup a wiki, give a thought to how these tools can be used to multiply our effectiveness.

I ask you to do this because we’re getting close to a critical point in the digital revolution – something I’ll cover in greater detail when I talk to you again on Thursday afternoon. Where we are right now is at an inflection point. Things are very fluid, and could go almost any direction. That’s why it’s so important we learn from each other: in that pooled knowledge is the kind of intelligence which can help us to make better decisions about the digital revolution in education. The kinds of decisions which will lead to better outcomes for kids, fewer headaches for administrators, and a growing confidence within the teaching staff.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t a panacea. Far from it. They’re simply the best tools we’ve got, right now, to help us confront the range of thorny issues raised by the transition to digital education. You can spend three days here, and go back to your own schools none the wiser. Or, you can share what you’ve learned and leave here with the best that everyone has to offer.

There’s a word for this process, a word which powers Wikipedia and a hundred thousand other websites: “crowdsourcing”. The basic idea is encapsulated in a Chinese proverb: “Many hands make light work.” The two hundred of you, here today, can all pitch in and make light work for yourselves. Or not.

Let me tell you another story, which may help seal your commitment to share what you know. In May of 1999, Silicon Valley software engineer John Swapceinski started a website called “Teacher Ratings.” Individuals could visit the site and fill in a brief form with details about their school, and their teacher. That done, they could rate the teacher’s capabilities as an instructor. The site started slowly, but, as is always the case with these sorts of “crowdsourced” ventures, as more ratings were added to the site, it became more useful to people, which meant more visitors, which meant more ratings, which meant it became even more useful, which meant more visitors, which meant more ratings, etc.

Somewhere in the middle of this virtuous cycle the site changed its name to “Rate My Professors.com” and changed hands twice. For the last two years, RateMyProfessors.com has been owned by MTV, which knows a thing or two about youth markets, and can see one in a site that has nine million reviews of one million teachers, professors and instructors in the US, Canada and the UK.

Although the individual action of sharing some information about an instructor seems innocuous enough, in aggregate the effect is entirely revolutionary. A student about to attend university in the United States can check out all of her potential instructors before she signs up for a single class. She can choose to take classes only with those instructors who have received the best ratings – or, rather more perversely, only with those instructors known to be easy graders. The student is now wholly in control of her educational opportunities, going in eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what to expect before the first day of class.

Although RateMyProfessors.com has enlightened students, it has made the work of educational administrators exponentially more difficult. Students now talk, up and down the years, via the recorded ratings on the site. It isn’t possible for an institution of higher education to disguise an individual who happens to be a world-class researcher but a rather ordinary lecturer. In earlier times, schools could foist these instructors on students, who’d be stuck for a semester. This no longer happens, because RateMyProfessors.com effectively warns students away from the poor-quality teachers.

This one site has undone all of the neat work of tenure boards and department chairs throughout the entire world of academia. A bad lecturer is no longer a department’s private little secret, but publicly available information. And a great lecturer is no longer a carefully hoarded treasure, but a hot commodity on a very public market. The instructors with the highest ratings on RateMyProfessors.com find themselves in demand, receiving outstanding offers (with tenure) from other universities. All of this plotting, which used to be hidden from view, is now fully revealed. The battle for control over who stands in front of the classroom has now been decisively lost by the administration in favor of the students.

Whether it’s Wikipedia, or RateMyProfessors.com, or the promise of your own work over these next three days, Douglas Engelbart’s original vision of intelligence augmentation holds true: it is possible for us to pool our intellectual resources, and increase our problem-solving capacity. We do it every time we use Wikipedia; students do it every time they use RateMyProfessors.com; and I’m asking you to do it, starting right now. Good luck!

We live in a time of wonders, and, more often than not, remain oblivious to them until they fail catastrophically. On the 19th of October, 1999 we saw such a failure. After years of preparation, on that day the web-accessible version of Encyclopedia Britannica went on-line. The online version of Britannica contained the complete, unexpurgated content of the many-volume print edition, and it was freely available, at no cost to its users.

I was not the only person who dropped by on the 19th to sample Britannica’s wares. Several million others joined me – all at once. The Encyclopedia’s few servers suddenly succumbed to the overload of traffic – the servers crashed, the network connections crashed, everything crashed. When the folks at Britannica conducted a forensic analysis of the failure, they learned something shocking: the site had crashed because, within its first hours, it had attracted nearly fifty million visitors.

The Web had never seen anything like that before. Yes, there were search engines such as Yahoo! and AltaVista (and even Google), but destination websites never attracted that kind of traffic. Britannica, it seemed, had tapped into a long-standing desire for high-quality factual information. As the gold-standard reference work in the English language, Britannica needed no advertising to bring traffic to its web servers – all it need do was open its doors. Suddenly, everyone doing research, or writing a paper, or just plain interested in learning more about something tried to force themselves through Britannica’s too narrow doorway.

Encyclopedia Britannica ordered some more servers, and installed a bigger pipe to the Internet, and within a few weeks was back in business. Immediately Britannica became one of the most-trafficked sites on the Web, as people came through in search of factual certainty. Yet for all of that traffic, Britannica somehow managed to lose money.

The specifics of this elude my understanding. The economics of the Web are very simple: eyeballs equals money. The more eyeballs you have, the more money you earn. That’s as true for Google as for Britannica. Yet, somehow, despite having one of the busiest websites in the world, Britannica lost money. For that reason, just a few month after it freely opened its doors to the public, Britannica hid itself behind a “paywall”, asking seven dollars a month as a fee to access its inner riches. Immediately, traffic to Britannica dropped to perhaps a hundredth of its former numbers. Britannica did not convert many of its visitors to paying customers: there may be a strong desire for factual information, but even so, most people did not consider it worth paying for. Instead, individuals continued to search for a freely available, high quality source of factual information.

Into this vacuum Wikipedia was born. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit has always been freely available, and, because of its use of the Creative Commons license, can be freely copied. Wikipedia was the modern birth of “crowdsourcing”, the idea that vast numbers of anonymous individuals can labor together (at a distance) on a common project. Wikipedia’s openness in every respect – transparent edits, transparent governance, transparent goals – encouraged participation. People were invited to come by and sample the high-quality factual information on offer – and were encouraged to leave their own offerings. The high-quality facts encouraged visitors; some visitors would leave their own contributions, high-quality facts which would encourage more visitors, and so, in a “virtuous cycle”, Wikipedia grew as large as, then far larger than Encyclopedia Britannica.

Today, we don’t even give a thought to Britannica. It may be the gold-standard reference work in the English language, but no one cares. Wikipedia is good enough, accurate enough (although Wikipedia was never intended to be a competitor to Britannica by 2005 Nature was doing comparative testing of article accuracy) and is much more widely available. Britannica has had its market eaten up by Wikipedia, a market it dominated for two hundred years. It wasn’t the server crash that doomed Britannica; when the business minds at Britannica tried to crash through into profitability, that’s when they crashed into the paywall they themselves established. Watch carefully: over the next decade we’ll see the somewhat drawn out death of Britannica as it becomes ever less relevant in a Wikipedia-dominated landscape.

Just a few weeks ago, the European Union launched a new website, Europeana. Europeana is a repository, a collection of cultural heritage of Europe, made freely available to everyone in the world via the Web. From Descartes to Darwin to Debussy, Europeana hopes to become the online cultural showcase of European thought.

The creators of Europeana scoured Europe’s cultural institutions for items to be digitized and placed within its own collection. Many of these institutions resisted their requests – they didn’t see any demand for these items coming from online communities. As it turns out, these institutions couldn’t have been more wrong. Europeana launched on the 20th of November, and, like Britannica before it, almost immediately crashed. The servers overloaded as visitors from throughout the EU came in to look at the collection. Europeana has been taken offline for a few months, as the EU buys more servers and fatter pipes to connect it all to the Internet. Sometime late in 2008 it will relaunch, and, if its brief popularity is any indication, we can expect Europeana to become another important online resource, like Wikipedia.

All three of these examples prove that there is an almost insatiable interest in factual information made available online, whether the dry articles of Wikipedia or the more bouncy cultural artifacts of Europeana. It’s also clear that arbitrarily restricting access to factual information simply directs the flow around the institution restricting access. Britannica could be earning over a hundred million dollars a year from advertising revenue – that’s what it is projected that Wikipedia could earn, just from banner advertisements, if it ever accepted advertising. But Britannica chose to lock itself away from its audience. That is the one unpardonable sin in the network era: under no circumstances do you take yourself off the network. We all have to sink or swim, crash through or crash, in this common sea of openness.

I only hope that the European museums who have donated works to Europeana don’t suddenly grow possessive when the true popularity of their works becomes a proven fact. That will be messy, and will only hurt the institutions. Perhaps they’ll heed the lesson of Britannica; but it seems as though many of our institutions are mired in older ways of thinking, where selfishness and protecting the collection are seen as a cardinal virtues. There’s a new logic operating: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.

II: The Universal Library

Just a few weeks ago, Google took this idea to new heights. In a landmark settlement of a long-running copyright dispute with book publishers in the United States, Google agreed to pay a license fee to those publishers for their copyrights – even for books out of print. In return, the publishers are allowing Google to index, search and display all of the books they hold under copyright. Google already provides the full text of many books which have an expired copyright – their efforts scanning whole libraries at Harvard and Stanford has given Google access to many such texts. Each of these texts is indexed and searchable – just as with the books under copyright, but, in this case, the full text is available through Google’s book reader tool. For works under copyright but out-of-print, Google is now acting as the sales agent, translating document searches into book sales for the publishers, who may now see huge “long tail” revenues generated from their catalogues.

Since Google is available from every computer connected to the Internet (given that it is available on most mobile handsets, it’s available to nearly every one of the four billion mobile subscribers on the planet), this new library – at least seven million volumes – has become available everywhere. The library has become coextensive with the Internet.

This was an early dream both of the pioneers of the personal computing, and, later, of the Web. When CD-ROM was introduced, twenty years ago, it was hailed as the “new papyrus,” capable of storing vast amounts of information in a richly hyperlinked format. As the limits of CD-ROM became apparent, the Web became the repository of the hopes of all the archivists and bibliophiles who dreamed of a new Library of Alexandria, a universal library with every text in every tongue freely available to all.

We have now gotten as close to that ideal as copyright law will allow; everything is becoming available, though perhaps not as freely as a librarian might like. (For libraries, Google has established subscription-based fees for access to books covered by copyright.) Within another few years, every book within arm’s length of Google (and Google has many, many arms) will be scanned, indexed and accessible through books.google.com. This library can be brought to bear everywhere anyone sits down before a networked screen. This library can serve billions, simultaneously, yet never exhaust its supply of texts.

What does this mean for the library as we have known it? Has Google suddenly obsolesced the idea of a library as a building stuffed with books? Is there any point in going into the stacks to find a book, when that same book is equally accessible from your laptop? Obviously, books are a better form factor than our laptops – five hundred years of human interface design have given us a format which is admirably well-adapted to our needs – but in most cases, accessibility trumps ease-of-use. If I can have all of the world’s books online, that easily bests the few I can access within any given library.

In a very real sense, Google is obsolescing the library, or rather, one of the features of the library, the feature we most identify with the library: book storage. Those books are now stored on servers, scattered in multiple, redundant copies throughout the world, and can be called up anywhere, at any time, from any screen. The library has been obsolesced because it has become universal; the stacks have gone virtual, sitting behind every screen. Because the idea of the library has become so successful, so universal, it no longer means anything at all. We are all within the library.

III: The Necessary Army

With the triumph of the universal library, we must now ask: What of the librarians? If librarians were simply the keepers-of-the-books, we would expect them to fade away into an obsolescence similar to the physical libraries. And though this is the popular perception of the librarian, in fact that is perhaps the least interesting of the tasks a librarian performs (although often the most visible).

The central task of the librarian – if I can be so bold as to state something categorically – is to bring order to chaos. The librarian takes a raw pile of information and makes it useful. How that happens differs from situation to situation, but all of it falls under the rubric of library science. At its most visible, the book cataloging systems used in all libraries represents the librarian’s best efforts to keep an overwhelming amount of information well-managed and well-ordered. A good cataloging system makes a library easy to use, whatever its size, however many volumes are available through its stacks.

It’s interesting to note that books.google.com uses Google’s text search-based interface. Based on my own investigations, you can’t type in a Library of Congress catalog number and get a list of books under that subject area. Google seems to have abandoned – or ignored – library science in its own book project. I can’t tell you why this is, I can only tell you that it looks very foolish and naïve. It may be that Google’s army of PhDs do not include many library scientists. Otherwise why would you have made such a beginner’s mistake? It smells of an amateur effort from a firm which is not known for amateurism.

It’s here that we can see the shape of the future, both in the immediate and longer term. People believe that because we’ve done with the library, we’re done with library science. They could not be more wrong. In fact, because the library is universal, library science now needs to be a universal skill set, more broadly taught than at any time previous to this. We have become a data-centric culture, and are presently drowning in data. It’s difficult enough for us to keep our collections of music and movies well organized; how can we propose to deal with collections that are a hundred thousand times larger?

This is not just some idle speculation; we are rapidly becoming a data-generating species. Where just a few years ago we might generate just a small amount of data on a given day or in a given week, these days we generate data almost continuously. Consider: every text message sent, every email received, every snap of a camera or camera phone, every slip of video shared amongst friends. It all adds up, and it all needs to be managed and stored and indexed and retrieved with some degree of ease. Otherwise, in a few years time the recent past will have disappeared into the fog of unsearchability. In order to have a connection to our data selves of the past, we are all going to need to become library scientists.

All of which puts you in a key position for the transformation already underway. You get to be the “life coaches” for our digital lifestyle, because, as these digital artifacts start to weigh us down (like Jacob Marley’s lockboxes), you will provide the guidance that will free us from these weights. Now that we’ve got it, it’s up to you to tell us how we find it. Now that we’ve captured it, it’s up to you to tell us how we index it.

We have already taken some steps along this journey: much of the digital media we create can now be “tagged”, that is, assigned keywords which provide context and semantic value for the media. We each create “clouds” of our own tags which evolve into “folksonomies”, or home-made taxonomies of meaning. Folksonomies and tagging are useful, but we lack the common language needed to make our digital treasures universally useful. If I tag a photograph with my own tags, that means the photograph is more useful to me; but it is not necessarily more broadly useful. Without a common, public taxonomy (a cataloging system), tagging systems will not scale into universality. That universality has value, because it allows us to extend our searches, our view, and our capability.

I could go on and on, but the basic point is this: wherever data is being created, that’s the opportunity for library science in the 21st century. Since data is being created almost absolutely everywhere, the opportunities for library science are similarly broad. It’s up to you to show us how it’s done, lest we drown in our own creations.

Some of this won’t come to pass until you move out of the libraries and into the streets. Library scientists have to prove their worth; most people don’t understand that they’re slowly drowning in a sea of their own information. This means you have to demonstrate other ways of working that are self-evident in their effectiveness. The proof of your value will be obvious. It’s up to you to throw the rest of us a life-preserver; once we’ve caught it, once we’ve caught on, your future will be assured.

The dilemma that confronts us is that for the next several years, people will be questioning the value of libraries; if books are available everywhere, why pay the upkeep on a building? Yet the value of a library is not the books inside, but the expertise in managing data. That can happen inside of a library; it has to happen somewhere. Libraries could well evolve into the resource the public uses to help manage their digital existence. Librarians will become partners in information management, indispensable and highly valued.

In a time of such radical and rapid change, it’s difficult to know exactly where things are headed. We know that books are headed online, and that libraries will follow. But we still don’t know the fate of librarians. I believe that the transition to a digital civilization will founder without a lot of fundamental input from librarians. We are each becoming archivists of our lives, but few of us have training in how to manage an archive. You are the ones who have that knowledge. Consider: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. The more you share your knowledge, the more invaluable you become. That’s the future that waits for you.

Finally, consider the examples of Britannica and Europeana. The demand for those well-curated collections of information far exceeded even the wildest expectations of their creators. Something similar lies in store for you. When you announce yourselves to the broader public as the individuals empowered to help us manage our digital lives, you’ll doubtless find yourselves overwhelmed with individuals who are seeking to benefit from your expertise. What’s more, to deal with the demand, I expect Library Science to become one of the hot subjects of university curricula of the 21st century. We need you, and we need a lot more of you, if we ever hope to make sense of the wonderful wealth of data we’re creating.

Our greatest fear, in bringing computers into the classroom, is that we teachers and instructors and lecturers will lose control of the classroom, lose touch with the students, lose the ability to make a difference. The computer is ultimately disruptive. It offers greater authority than any instructor, greater resources than any lecturer, and greater reach than any teacher. The computer is not perfect, but it is indefatigable. The computer is not omniscient, but it is comprehensive. The computer is not instantaneous, but it is faster than any other tool we’ve ever used.

All of this puts the human being at a disadvantage; in a classroom full of machines, the human factor in education is bound to be overlooked. Even though we know that everyone learns more effectively when there’s a teacher or mentor present, we want to believe that everything can be done with the computer. We want the machines to distract, and we hope that in that distraction some education might happen. But distraction is not enough. There must be a point to the exercise, some reason that makes all the technology worthwhile. That search for a point – a search we are still mostly engaged in – will determine whether these computers are meaningful to the educational process, or if they are an impediment to learning.

It’s all about control.

What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.

In May of 1999, Silicon Valley software engineer John Swapceinski started a website called “Teacher Ratings.” Individuals could visit the site and fill in a brief form with details about their school, and their teacher. That done, they could rate the teacher’s capabilities as an instructor. The site started slowly, but, as is always the case with these sorts of “crowdsourced” ventures, as more ratings were added to the site, it became more useful to people, which meant more visitors, which meant more ratings, which meant it became even more useful, which meant more visitors, which meant more ratings, etc. Somewhere in the middle of this virtuous cycle the site changed its name to “Rate My Professors.com” and changed hands twice. For the last two years, RateMyProfessors.com has been owned by MTV, which knows a thing or two about youth markets, and can see one in a site that has nine million reviews of one million teachers, professors and instructors in the US, Canada and the UK.

Although the individual action of sharing some information about an instructor seems innocuous enough, in aggregate the effect is entirely revolutionary. A student about to attend university in the United States can check out all of her potential instructors before she signs up for a single class. She can choose to take classes only with those instructors who have received the best ratings – or, rather more perversely, only with those instructors known to be easy graders. The student is now wholly in control of her educational opportunities, going in eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what to expect before the first day of class.

Although RateMyProfessors.com has enlightened students, it has made the work of educational administrators exponentially more difficult. Students now talk, up and down the years, via the recorded ratings on the site. It isn’t possible for an institution of higher education to disguise an individual who happens to be a world-class researcher but a rather ordinary lecturer. In earlier times, schools could foist these instructors on students, who’d be stuck for a semester. This no longer happens, because RateMyProfessors.com effectively warns students away from the poor-quality teachers.

This one site has undone all of the neat work of tenure boards and department chairs throughout the entire world of academia. A bad lecturer is no longer a department’s private little secret, but publicly available information. And a great lecturer is no longer a carefully hoarded treasure, but a hot commodity on a very public market. The instructors with the highest ratings on RateMyProfessors.com find themselves in demand, receiving outstanding offers (with tenure) from other universities. All of this plotting, which used to be hidden from view, is now fully revealed. The battle for control over who stands in front of the classroom has now been decisively lost by the administration in favor of the students.

This is not something that anyone expected; it certainly wasn’t what John Swapceinski had in mind when founded Teacher Ratings. He wasn’t trying to overturn the prerogatives of heads of school around the world. He was simply offering up a place for people to pool their knowledge. That knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.

This rating system serves as an archetype for what it is about to happen to education in general. If we are smart enough, we can learn a lesson here and now that we will eventually learn – rather more expensively – if we wait. The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.

The chaos is not something we should be afraid of. Like King Canute, we can’t roll back the tide of chaos that’s rolling over us. We can’t roll back the clock to an earlier age without computers, without Internet, without the subtle but profound distraction of text messaging. The school is of its time, not out it. Which means we must play the hand we’ve been dealt. That’s actually a good thing, because we hold a lot of powerful cards, or can, if we choose to face the chaos head on.

II: Do It Ourselves

If we take the example of RateMyProfessors.com and push it out a little bit, we can see the shape of things to come. But there are some other trends which are also becoming visible. The first and most significant of these is the trend toward sharing lecture material online, so that it reaches a very large audience. Spearheaded by Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of which have placed their entire set of lectures online through iTunes University, these educational institutions assert that the lectures themselves aren’t the real reason students spend $50,000 a year to attend these schools; the lectures only have full value in context. This is true, in some sense, but it discounts the possibility that some individuals or group of individuals might create their own context around the lectures. And this is where the future seems to be pointing.

When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?

At the moment the educational institution has an advantage over the singular student, in that it exists to coordinate the various functions of education. The student doesn’t have access to the same facilities or coordination tools. But we already see that this is changing; RateMyProfessors.com points the way. Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses? I’m sure that if this hasn’t been invented already someone is currently working on it – it’s the natural outgrowth of all the efforts toward student empowerment we’ve seen over the last several years.

In this near future world, students are the administrators. All of the administrative functions have been “pushed down” into a substrate of software. Education has evolved into something like a marketplace, where instructors “bid” to work with students. Now since most education is funded by the government, there will obviously be other forces at play; it may be that “administration”, such as it is, represents the government oversight function which ensures standards are being met. In any case, this does not look much like the educational institution of the 20th century – though it does look quite a bit like the university of the 13th century, where students would find and hire instructors to teach them subjects.

The role of the instructor has changed as well; as recently as a few years ago the lecturer was the font of wisdom and source of all knowledge – perhaps with a companion textbook. In an age of Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter this no longer the case. The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructor facilitates and mentors, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers, anywhere.

The administration has gone, the instructor’s role has evolved, now what happens to the classroom itself? In the context of a larger school facility, it may or may not be relevant. A classroom is clearly relevant if someone is learning engine repair, but perhaps not if learning calculus. The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens. If it can happen entirely online, that will be the classroom. If it requires substantial darshan with the instructor, it will have a physical local, which may or may not be a building dedicated to education. (It could, in many cases, simply be a field outdoors, again harkening back to 13th-century university practices.) At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode – vanishing online – and explode – the world will become the classroom.

This, then, can already be predicted from current trends; once RateMyProfessors.com succeeded in destabilizing the institutional hierarchies in education, everything else became inevitable. Because this transformation lies mostly in the future, it is possible to shape these trends with actions taken in the present. In the worst case scenario, our educational institutions to not adjust to the pressures placed upon them by this new generation of students, and are simply swept aside by these students as they rise into self-empowerment. But the worst case need not be the only case. There are concrete steps which institutions can take to ease the transition from our highly formal present into our wildly informal future. In order to roll with the punches delivered by these newly-empowered students, educational institutions must become more fluid, more open, more atomic, and less interested the hallowed traditions of education than in outcomes.

III: All and Everything

Flexibility and fluidity are the hallmark qualities of the 21st century educational institution. An analysis of the atomic features of the educational process shows that the course is a series of readings, assignments and lectures that happen in a given room on a given schedule over a specific duration. In our drive to flexibility how can we reduce the class into to essential, indivisible elements? How can we capture those elements? Once captured, how can we get these elements to the students? And how can the students share elements which they’ve found in their own studies?

Recommendation #1: Capture Everything

I am constantly amazed that we simply do not record almost everything that occurs in public forums as a matter of course. This talk is being recorded for a later podcast – and so it should be. Not because my words are particularly worthy of preservation, but rather because this should now be standard operating procedure for education at all levels, for all subject areas. It simply makes no sense to waste my words – literally, pouring them away – when with very little infrastructure an audio recording can be made, and, with just a bit more infrastructure, a video recording can be made.

This is the basic idea that’s guiding Stanford and MIT: recording is cheap, lecturers are expensive, and students are forgetful. Somewhere in the middle these three trends meet around recorded media. Yes, a student at Stanford who misses a lecture can download and watch it later, and that’s a good thing. But it also means that any student, anywhere, can download the same lecture.

Yes, recording everything means you end up with a wealth of media that must be tracked, stored, archived, referenced and so forth. But that’s all to the good. Every one of these recordings has value, and the more recordings you have, the larger the horde you’re sitting upon. If you think of it like that – banking your work – the logic of capturing everything becomes immediately clear.

Recommendation #2: Share Everything

While education definitely has value – teachers are paid for the work – that does not mean that resources, once captured, should be tightly restricted to authorized users only. In fact, the opposite is the case: the resources you capture should be shared as broadly as can possibly be managed. More than just posting them onto a website (or YouTube or iTunes), you should trumpet their existence from the highest tower. These resources are your calling card, these resources are your recruiting tool. If someone comes across one of your lectures (or other resources) and is favorably impressed by it, how much more likely will they be to attend a class?

The center of this argument is simple, though subtle: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.

If universities as illustrious (and expensive) as Stanford and MIT could both share their full courseware online, without worrying that it would dilute the value of the education they offer, how can any other institution hope to refute their example? Both voted with their feet, and both show a different way to value education – as experience. You can’t download experience. You can’t bottle it. Experience has to be lived, and that requires a teacher.

Recommendation #3: Open Everything

You will be approached by many vendors promising all sorts of wonderful things that will make the educational processes seamless and nearly magical for both educators and students. Don’t believe a word of it. (If I had a dollar for every gripe I’ve heard about Blackboard and WebCT, I’d be a very wealthy man.) There is no off-the-shelf tool that is perfectly equipped for every situation. Each tool tries to shoehorn an infinity of possibilities into a rather limited palette.

Rather than going for a commercial solution, I would advise you to look at the open-source solutions. Rather than buying a solution, use Moodle, the open-source, Australian answer to digital courseware. Going open means that as your needs change, the software can change to meet those needs. Given the extraordinary pressures education will be under over the next few years, openness is a necessary component of flexibility.

Openness is also about achieving a certain level of device-independence. Education happens everywhere, not just with your nose down in a book, or stuck into a computer screen. There are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital. Many students will never be very computer literate, but every single one of them has a mobile handset, and every single one of them sends text messages. It’s the big of computer technology we nearly always overlook – because it is so commonplace. Consider every screen when you capture, and when you share; dealing with them all as equals will help you work find audiences you never suspected you’d have.

There is a third aspect of openness: open networks. Educators of every stripe throughout Australia are under enormous pressure to “clean” the network feeds available to students. This is as true for adult students as it is for educators who have a duty-of-care relationship with their students. Age makes no difference, apparently. The Web is big, bad, evil and must be tamed.

Yet net filtering throws the baby out with the bathwater. Services like Twitter get filtered out because they could potentially be disruptive, cutting students off from the amazing learning potential of social messaging. Facebook and MySpace are seen as time-wasters, rather than tools for organizing busy schedules. The list goes on: media sites are blocked because the schools don’t have enough bandwidth to support them; Wikipedia is blocked because teachers don’t want students cheating.

All of this has got to stop. The classroom does not exist in isolation, nor can it continue to exist in opposition to the Internet. Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.

Recommendation #4: Only Connect

Mind the maxim of the 21st century: connection is king. Students must be free to connect with instructors, almost at whim. This becomes difficult for instructors to manage, but it is vital. Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life. Students should also be able to freely connect with educational administration; a fruitful relationship will keep students actively engaged in the mechanics of their education.

Finally, students must be free to (and encouraged to) connect with their peers. Part of the reason we worry about lecturers being overburdened by all this connectivity is because we have yet to realize that this is a multi-lateral, multi-way affair. It’s not as though all questions and issues immediately rise to the instructor’s attention. This should happen if and only if another student can’t be found to address the issue. Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education. Again, look to RateMyProfessors.com – it shows the value of “crowdsourced” learning.

Connection is expensive, not in dollars, but in time. But for all its drawbacks, connection enriches us enormously. It allows us to multiply our reach, and learn from the best. The challenge of connectivity is nowhere near as daunting as the capabilities it delivers. Yet we know already that everyone will be looking to maintain control and stability, even as everything everywhere becomes progressively reshaped by all this connectivity. We need to let go, we need to trust ourselves enough to recognize that what we have now, though it worked for a while, is no longer fit for the times. If we can do that, we can make this transition seamless and pleasant. So we must embrace sharing and openness and connectivity; in these there’s the fluidity we need for the future.

If a picture paints a thousand words, you’ve just absorbed a million, the equivalent of one-and-a-half Bibles. That’s the way it is, these days. Nothing is small, nothing discrete, nothing bite-sized. Instead, we get the fire hose, 24 x 7, a world in which connection and community have become so colonized by intensity and amplification that nearly nothing feels average anymore.

Is this what we wanted? It’s become difficult to remember the before-time, how it was prior to an era of hyperconnectivity. We’ve spent the last fifteen years working out the most excellent ways to establish, strengthen and multiply the connections between ourselves. The job is nearly done, but now, as we put down our tools and pause to catch our breath, here comes the question we’ve dreaded all along…

Why. Why this?

I gave this question no thought at all as I blithely added friends to Twitter, shot past the limits of Dunbar’s Number, through the ridiculous, and then outward, approaching the sheer insanity of 1200 so-called-“friends” whose tweets now scroll by so quickly that I can’t focus on any one saying any thing because this motion blur is such that by the time I think to answer in reply, the tweet in question has scrolled off the end of the world.

This is ludicrous, and can not continue. But this is vital and can not be forgotten. And this is the paradox of the first decade of the 21st century: what we want – what we think we need – is making us crazy.

Some of this craziness is biological.

Eleven million years of evolution, back to Proconsul, the ancestor of all the hominids, have crafted us into quintessentially social creatures. We are human to the degree we are in relationship with our peers. We grew big forebrains, to hold banks of the chattering classes inside our own heads, so that we could engage these simulations of relationships in never-ending conversation. We never talk to ourselves, really. We engage these internal others in our thoughts, endlessly rehearsing and reliving all of the social moments which comprise the most memorable parts of life.

It’s crowded in there. It’s meant to be. And this has only made it worse.

No man is an island. Man is only man when he is part of a community. But we have limits. Homo Sapiens Sapiens spent two hundred thousand years exploring the resources afforded by a bit more than a liter of neural tissue. The brain has physical limits (we have to pass through the birth canal without killing our mothers) so our internal communities top out at Dunbar’s magic Number of 150, plus or minus a few.

Dunbar’s Number defines the crucial threshold between a community and a mob. Communities are made up of memorable and internalized individuals; mobs are unique in their lack of distinction. Communities can be held in one’s head, can be tended and soothed and encouraged and cajoled.

Four years ago, when I began my research into sharing and social networks, I asked a basic question: Will we find some way to transcend this biological limit, break free of the tyranny of cranial capacity, grow beyond the limits of Dunbar’s Number?

After all, we have the technology. We can hyperconnect in so many ways, through so many media, across the entire range of sensory modalities, it is as if the material world, which we have fashioned into our own image, wants nothing more than to boost our capacity for relationship.

And now we have two forces in opposition, both originating in the mind. Our old mind hews closely to the community and Dunbar’s Number. Our new mind seeks the power of the mob, and the amplification of numbers beyond imagination. This is the central paradox of the early 21st century, this is the rift which will never close. On one side we are civil, and civilized. On the other we are awesome, terrible, and terrifying. And everything we’ve done in the last fifteen years has simply pushed us closer to the abyss of the awesome.

We can not reasonably put down these new weapons of communication, even as they grind communities beneath them like so many old and brittle bones. We can not turn the dial of history backward. We are what we are, and already we have a good sense of what we are becoming. It may not be pretty – it may not even feel human – but this is things as they are.

When the historians of this age write their stories, a hundred years from now, they will talk about amplification as the defining feature of this entire era, the three hundred year span from industrial revolution to the emergence of the hyperconnected mob. In the beginning, the steam engine amplified the power of human muscle - making both human slavery and animal power redundant. In the end, our technologies of communication amplified our innate social capabilities, which eleven million years of natural selection have consistently selected for. Above and beyond all of our other natural gifts, those humans who communicate most effectively stand the greatest chance of passing their genes along to subsequent generations. It’s as simple as that. We talk our partners into bed, and always have.

The steam engine transformed the natural world into a largely artificial environment; the amplification of our muscles made us masters of the physical world. Now, the technologies of hyperconnectivity are translating the natural world, ruled by Dunbar’s Number, into the dominating influence of maddening crowd.

We are not prepared for this. We have no biological defense mechanism. We are all going to have to get used to a constant state of being which resembles nothing so much as a stack overflow, a consistent social incontinence, as we struggle to retain some aspects of selfhood amidst the constantly eroding pressure of the hyperconnected mob.

Given this, and given that many of us here today are already in the midst of this, it seems to me that the most useful tool any of us could have, moving forward into this future, is a social contextualizer. This prosthesis – which might live in our mobiles, or our nettops, or our Bluetooth headsets – will fill our limited minds with the details of our social interactions.

This tool will make explicit that long, Jacob Marley-like train of lockboxes that are our interactions in the techno-social sphere. Thus, when I introduce myself to you for the first or the fifteen hundredth time, you can be instantly brought up to date on why I am relevant, why I matter. When all else gets stripped away, each relationship has a core of salience which can be captured (roughly), and served up every time we might meet.

I expect that this prosthesis will come along sooner rather than later, and that it will rival Google in importance. Google took too much data and made it roughly searchable. This prosthesis will take too much connectivity and make it roughly serviceable. Given that we primarily social beings, I expect it to be a greater innovation, and more broadly disruptive.

And this prosthesis has precedents; at Xerox PARC they have been looking into a ‘human memory prosthesis’ for sufferers from senile dementia, a device which constantly jogs human memories as to task, place, and people. The world that we’re making for ourselves, every time we connect, is a place where we are all (in some relative sense) demented. Without this tool we will be entirely lost. We’re already slipping beneath the waves. We need this soon. We need this now.

I hope you’ll get inventive.

II. THAT.

Now that we have comfortably settled into the central paradox of our current era, with a world that is working through every available means to increase our connectivity, and a brain that is suddenly overloaded and sinking beneath the demands of the sum total of these connections, we need to ask that question: Exactly what is hyperconnectivity good for? What new thing does that bring us?

The easy answer is the obvious one: crowdsourcing. The action of a few million hyperconnected individuals resulted in a massive and massively influential work: Wikipedia. But the examples only begin there. They range much further afield.

Uni students have been sharing their unvarnished assessments of their instructors and lecturers. Ratemyprofessors.com has become the bête noire of the academy, because researchers who can’t teach find they have no one signing up for their courses, while the best lecturers, with the highest ratings, suddenly find themselves swarmed with offers for better teaching positions at more prestigious universities. A simply and easily implemented system of crowdsourced reviews has carefully undone all of the work of the tenure boards of the academy.

It won’t be long until everything else follows. Restaurant reviews – that’s done. What about reviews of doctors? Lawyers? Indian chiefs? Politicans? ISPs? (Oh, wait, we have that with Whirlpool.) Anything you can think of. Anything you might need. All of it will have been so extensively reviewed by such a large mob that you will know nearly everything that can be known before you sign on that dotted line.

All of this means that every time we gather together in our hyperconnected mobs to crowdsource some particular task, we become better informed, we become more powerful. Which means it becomes more likely that the hyperconnected mob will come together again around some other task suited to crowdsourcing, and will become even more powerful. That system of positive feedbacks – which we are already quite in the midst of – is fashioning a new polity, a rewritten social contract, which is making the institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries – that is, the industrial era – seem as antiquated and quaint as the feudal systems which they replaced.

It is not that these institutions are dying, but rather, they now face worthy competitors. Democracy, as an example, works well in communities, but can fail epically when it scales to mobs. Crowdsourced knowledge requires a mob, but that knowledge, once it has been collected, can be shared within a community, to hyperempower that community. This tug-of-war between communities and crowds is setting all of our institutions, old and new, vibrating like taught strings.

We already have a name for this small-pieces-loosely-joined form of social organization: it’s known as anarcho-syndicalism. Anarcho-Syndicalism emerged from the labor movements that grew in numbers and power toward the end of the 19th century. Its basic idea is simply that people will choose to cooperate more often than they choose to compete, and this cooperation can form the basis for a social, political and economic contract wherein the people manage themselves.

A system with no hierarchy, no bosses, no secrets, no politics. (Well, maybe that last one is asking too much.) Anarcho-syndicalism takes as a given that all men are created equal, and therefore each have a say in what they choose to do.

Somewhere back before Australia became a nation, anarcho-syndicalist trade unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (or, more commonly, the ‘Wobblies’) fought armies of mercenaries in the streets of the major industrial cities of the world, trying get the upper hand in the battle between labor and capital. They failed because capital could outmaneuver labor in the 19th century. Today the situation is precisely reversed. Capital is slow. Knowledge is fast, the quicksilver that enlivens all our activities.

I come before you today wearing my true political colors – literally. I did not pick a red jumper and black pants by some accident or wardrobe malfunction. These are the colors of anarcho-syndicalism. And that is the new System of the World.

You don’t have to believe me. You can dismiss my political posturing as sheer radicalism. But I ask you to cast your mind further than this stage this afternoon, and look out on a world which is permanently and instantaneously hyperconnected, and I ask you – how could things go any other way? Every day one of us invents a new way to tie us together or share what we know; as that invention is used, it is copied by those who see it being used.

When we imitate the successful behaviors of our hyperconnected peers, this ‘hypermimesis’ means that we are all already in a giant collective. It’s not a hive mind, and it’s not an overmind. It’s something weirdly in-between. Connected we are smarter by far than we are as individuals, but this connection conditions and constrains us, even as it liberates us. No gift comes for free.

I assert, on the weight of a growing mountain of evidence, that anarcho-syndicalism is the place where the community meets the crowd; it is the environment where this social prosthesis meets that radical hyperempowerment of capabilities.

Let me give you one example, happening right now. The classroom walls are disintegrating (and thank heaven for that), punctured by hyperconnectivity, as the outside world comes rushing in to meet the student, and the student leaves the classroom behind for the school of the world. The student doesn’t need to be in the classroom anymore, nor does the false rigor of the classroom need to be drilled into the student. There is such a hyperabundance of instruction and information available, students needs a mentor more than a teacher, a guide through the wilderness, and not a penitentiary to prevent their journey.

Now the students, and their parents – and the teachers and instructors and administrators – need to find a new way to work together, a communion of needs married to a community of gifts. The school is transforming into an anarcho-syndicalist collective, where everyone works together as peers, comes together in a “more perfect union”, to educate. There is no more school-as-a-place-you-go-to-get-your-book-learning. School is a state of being, an act of communion.

If this is happening to education, can medicine, and law, and politics be so very far behind? Of course not. But, unlike the elites of education, these other forces will resist and resist and resist all change, until such time as they have no choice but to surrender to mobs which are smarter, faster and more flexible than they are. In twenty years time they all these institutions will be all but unrecognizable.

All of this is light-years away from how our institutions have been designed. Those institutions – all institutions – are feeling the strain of informational overload. More than that, they’re now suffering the death of a thousand cuts, as the various polities serviced by each of these institutions actually outperform them.

You walk into your doctor’s office knowing more about your condition than your doctor. You understand the implications of your contract better than your lawyer. You know more about a subject than your instructor. That’s just the way it is, in the era of hyperconnectivity.

So we must band together. And we already have. We have come together, drawn by our interests, put our shoulders to the wheel, and moved the Earth upon its axis. Most specifically, those of you in this theatre with me this arvo have made the world move, because the Web is the fulcrum for this entire transformation. In less than two decades we’ve gone from physicists plaything to rewriting the rules of civilization.

But try not to think about that too much. It could go to your head.

III. THE OTHER.

Back in July, just after Vodafone had announced its meager data plans for iPhone 3G, I wrote a short essay for Ross Dawson’s Future of Media blog. I griped and bitched and spat the dummy, summing things up with this line:

“It’s time to show the carriers we can do this ourselves.”

I recommended that we start the ‘Future Australian Carrier’, or FAUC, and proceeded to invite all of my readers to get FAUCed. A harmless little incitement to action. What could possibly go wrong?

Within a day’s time a FAUC Facebook group had been started – without my input – and I was invited to join. Over the next two weeks about four hundred people joined that group, individuals who had simply had enough grief from their carriers and were looking for something better. After that, although there was some lively discussion about a possible logo, and some research into how MVNOs actually worked, nothing happened.

About a month later, individuals began to ping me, both on Facebook and via Twitter, asking, “What happened with that carrier you were going to start, Mark? Hmm?” As if somehow, I had signed on the dotted line to be chief executive, cheerleader, nose-wiper and bottle-washer for FAUC.

All of this caught me by surprise, because I certainly hadn’t signed up to create anything. I’d floated an idea, nothing more. Yet everyone was looking to me to somehow bring this new thing into being.

After I’d been hit up a few times, I started to understand where the epic !FAIL! had occurred. And the failure wasn’t really mine. You see, I’ve come to realize a sad and disgusting little fact about all of us: We need and we need and we need.

We need others to gather the news we read. We need others to provide the broadband we so greedily lap up. We need other to govern us. And god forbid we should be asked to shoulder some of the burden. We’ll fire off a thousand excuses about how we’re so time poor even the cat hasn’t been fed in a week.

So, sure, four hundred people might sign up to a Facebook group to indicate their need for a better mobile carrier, but would any of them think of stepping forward to spearhead its organization, its cash-raising, or it leasing agreements? No. That’s all too much hard work. All any of these people needed was cheap mobile broadband.

Well, cheap don’t come cheaply.

Of course, this happens everywhere up and down the commercial chain of being. QANTAS and Telstra outsource work to southern Asia because they can’t be bothered to pay for local help, because their stockholders can’t be bothered to take a small cut in their quarterly dividends.

There’s no difference in the act itself, just in its scale. And this isn’t even raw economics. This is a case of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Carve some profit today, spend a fortune tomorrow to recover. We see it over and over and over again (most recently and most expensively on Wall Street), but somehow the point never makes it through our thick skulls. It’s probably because we human beings find it much easier to imagine three months into the future than three years. That’s a cognitive feature which helps if you’re on the African savannah, but sucks if you’re sitting in an Australian boardroom.

So this is the other thing. The ugly thing that no one wants to look at, because to look at it involves an admission of laziness. Well folks, let me be the first one here to admit it: I’m lazy. I’m too lazy to administer my damn Qmail server, so I use Gmail. I’m too lazy to setup WebDAV, so I use Google Docs. I’m too lazy to keep my devices synced, so I use MobileMe. And I’m too lazy to start my own carrier, so instead I pay a small fortune each month to Vodafone, for lousy service.

And yes, we’re all so very, very busy. I understand this. Every investment of time is a tradeoff. Yet we seem to defer, every time, to let someone else do it for us.

And is this wise? The more I see of cloud computing, the more I am convinced that it has become a single-point-of-failure for data communications. The decade-and-a-half that I spent as a network engineer tells me that. Don’t trust the cloud. Don’t trust redundancy. Trust no one. Keep your data in the cloud if you must, but for goodness’ sake, keep another copy locally. And another copy on the other side of the world. And another under your mattress.

I’m telling you things I shouldn’t have to tell you. I’m telling you things that you already know. But the other, this laziness, it’s built into our culture. Socially, we have two states of being: community and crowd. A community can collaborate to bring a new mobile carrier into being. A crowd can only gripe about their carrier. And now, as the strict lines between community and crowd get increasingly confused because of the upswing in hyperconnectivity, we behave like crowds when we really ought to be organizing like a community.

And this, at last, is the other thing: the message I really want to leave you with. You people, here in this auditorium today, you are the masters of the world. Not your bosses, not your shareholders, not your users. You. You folks, right here and right now. The keys to the kingdom of hyperconnectivity have been given to you. You can contour, shape and control that chaotic meeting point between community and crowd. That is what you do every time you craft an interface, or write a script. Your work helps people self-organize. Your work can engage us at our laziest, and turn us into happy worker bees. It can be done. Wikipedia has shown the way.

And now, as everything hierarchical and well-ordered dissolves into the grey goo which is the other thing, you have to ask yourself, “Who does this serve?”

At the end of the day, you’re answerable to yourself. No one else is going to do the heavy lifting for you. So when you think up an idea or dream up a design, consider this: Will it help people think for themselves? Will it help people meet their own needs? Or will it simply continue to infantilize us, until we become a planet of dummy-spitting, whinging, wankers?

It’s a question I ask myself, too, a question that’s shaping the decisions I make for myself. I want to make things that empower people, so I’ve decided to take some time to work with Andy Coffey, and re-think the book for the 21st century. Yes, that sounds ridiculous and ambitious and quixotic, but it’s also a development whose time is long overdue. If it succeeds at all, we will provide a publishing platform for people to share their long-form ideas. Everything about it will be open source and freely available to use, to copy, and to hack, because I already know that my community is smarter than I am.

And it’s a question I have answered for myself in another way. This is my third annual appearance before you at Web Directions South. It will be the last time for some time. You people are my community; where I knew none of you back in 2006; I consider many of you friends in 2008. Yet, when I talk to you like this, I get the uncomfortable feeling that my community has become a crowd. So, for the next few years, let’s have someone else do the closing keynote. I want to be with my peeps, in the audience, and on the Twitter backchannel, taking the piss and trading ideas.

The future – for all of us – is the battle over the boundary between the community and the crowd. I am choosing to embrace the community. It seems the right thing to do. And as I walk off-stage here, this afternoon, I want you to remember that each of you holds the keys to the kingdom. Our community is yours to shape as you will. Everything that you do is translated into how we operate as a culture, as a society, as a civilization. It can be a coming together, or it can be a breaking apart. And it’s up to you.

Not that there’s any pressure.

Recorded in New York City, 23 June 2008 - the day before I delivered “Hyperpolitics, American Style” at the Personal Democracy Forum. A wide-ranging discussion on hyperconnectivity, hyperpolitics, media, hyperdistribution, and lots of other fun things.

Many thanks to Mark for getting it up!

My brief keynote to the ICT Roundtable of the TAFE Sydney Institute. Recorded on Wednesday, 13 August 2008. Many thanks to Trish James and Stephan Ridgway for arranging the audio recording!

My presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum, Lincoln Center, New York City, 24 June 2008. Many thanks to Micah Sifry and the PdF staff for making it all possible.

We have been human beings for perhaps sixty thousand years. In all that time, our genome, the twenty-five thousand genes and three billion base pairs which comprise the source code for Homo Sapiens Sapiens has hardly changed.

For at least three thousand generations, we’ve had big brains to think with, a descended larynx to speak with, and opposable thumbs to grasp with. Yet, for almost ninety percent of that enormous span of time, humanity remained a static presence.

Our ancestors entered the world and passed on from it, but the patterns of culture remained remarkably stable, persistent and conservative. This posed a conundrum for paleoanthropologists, long known as ‘the sapient paradox’: if we had the “kit” for it, why did civilization take so long to arise?

Cambridge archeologist Colin Renfrew (more formally, Baron Renfrew of Kamisthorn) recently proposed an answer. We may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it.

We had to pass through symbolization, investing the outer world with inner meaning (in the process, creating some great art), before we could begin to develop the highly symbolic processes of cities, culture, law, and government.

About ten thousand years ago, the hidden interiority of humanity, passed down through myths and teachings and dreamings, built up a cultural reservoir of social capacity which overtopped the dam of the conservative patterns of humanity. We booted up (as it were) into a culture now so familiar we rarely take notice of it.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, evolutionary biologist and geographer Jared Diamond presented a model which elegantly explains how various peoples crossed the gap into civilization.

Cultures located along similar climatic regions on the planet’s surface could and did share innovations, most significantly along the broad swath of land from the Yangtze to the Rhine. This sharing accelerated the development of each of the populations connected together through the material flow of plants and animals and the immaterial flow of ideas and symbols. Where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet. Cities emerged in Anatolia, Palestine and the Fertile Crescent, and civilization spread out, over the next five hundred generations, to cover all of Eurasia.

Civilization proved another conservative force in human culture; despite the huge increases in population, the social order of Jericho looks little different from those of Imperial Rome or the Qin Dynasty or Medieval France.

But when Gutenberg (borrowing from the Chinese) perfected moveable type, he led the way to another and even broader form of cultural sharing; literacy became widespread in the aftermath of the printing press, and savants throughout the Europe published their insights, sharing their own expertise, producing the Enlightenment and igniting the Scientific Revolution. Peer-review, although portrayed today as a conservative force, initially acted as a radical intellectual accelerant, a mental hormone which again amplified the engines of human culture, leading directly to the Industrial Age.

The conservative empires fell, replaced by demos, the people: the cogs and wheels of a new system of the world which allowed for massive cities, massive markets, mass media, massive growth in human knowledge, and a new type of radicalism, known as Liberalism, which asserted the freedom of capital, labor, and people. That Liberalism, after two hundred and fifty years of ascendancy, has become the conservative order of culture, and faces its own existential threat, the result of another innovation in sharing.

Last month, The Economist, that fountainhead of Ur-Liberalism, proclaimed humanity “halfway there.” Somewhere in the last few months, half the population of the planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decade’s time we’ve gone from half the world having never made a telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile.

It took nearly a decade to get to the first billion, four years to the second, eighteen months to the third, and – sometime during 2011 – over five billion of us will be connected. Mobile handsets will soon be in the hands of everyone except the billion and a half extremely poor; microfinance organizations like Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank work hard to ensure that even this destitute minority have access to mobiles. Why? Mobiles may be the most potent tool yet invented for the elimination of poverty.

To those of us in the developed word this seems a questionable assertion. For us, mobiles are mainly social accelerants: no one is ever late anymore, just delayed. But, for entire populations who have never had access to instantaneous global communication, the mobile unleashes the innate, inherent and inalienable capabilities of sociability. Sociability has always been the cornerstone to human effectiveness. Being social has always been the best way to get ahead.

Until recently, we’d seen little to correlate mobiles with human economic development. But, here again, we see the gap between raw hardware capabilities and their expression in cultural software. Handing someone a mobile is not the end of the story, but the beginning. Nor is this purely a phenomenon of the developing world, or of the poor. We had the Web for almost a decade before we really started to work it toward its potential. Wikis were invented in 1995, marking it as an early web technology; the idea of Wikipedia took another six years.

Even SMS, the true carrier of the Human Network, had been dismissed by the telecommunications giants as uninteresting, a sideshow. Last year we sent forty three billion text messages.

We have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the ‘hyperconnectivity’ engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

This is coming as a bit of a shock.

Part Two: Hypermimesis

I have two nephews, Alexander and Andrew, born in 2001, and 2002. Alexander watched his mother mousing around on her laptop, and – from about 18 months – reached out to play with the mouse, imitating her actions. By age three Alex had a fair degree of control over the mouse; his younger brother watched him at play, and copied his actions. Soon, both wrestled for control of a mouse that both had mastered. Children are experts in mimesis – learning by imitation. It’s been shown that young chimpanzees regularly outscore human toddlers on cognitive tasks, while the children far surpass the chimps in their ability to “ape” behavior. We are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers.

Our peers now number three and a half billion.

Whenever any one of us displays a new behavior in a hyperconnected context, that behavior is inherently transparent, visible and observed. If that behavior is successful, it is immediately copied by those who witnessed the behavior, then copied by those who witness that behavior, and those who witnessed that behavior, and so on. Very quickly, that behavior becomes part of the global behavioral kit. As its first-order emergent quality, hyperconnectivity produces hypermimesis, the unprecedented acceleration of the natural processes of observational learning, where each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously.

Only a decade ago the network was all hardware and raw potential, but we are learning fast, and this learning is pervasive. Behaviors, once slowly copied from generation to generation, then, still slowly, from location to location, now ‘hyperdistribute’ themselves via the Human Network. We all learn from each other with every text we send, and each new insight becomes part of the new software of a new civilization.

We still do not know much about this nascent cultural form, even as its pieces pop out of the ether all around us. We know that it is fluid, flexible, mobile, pervasive and inexorable. We know that it does not allow for the neat proprieties of privacy and secrecy and ownership which define the fundamental ground of Liberal civilization. We know that, even as it grows, it encounters conservative forces intent on moderating its impact. Yet every assault, every tariff, every law designed to constrain this Human Network has failed.

The Chinese, who gave it fair go, have conceded the failure of their “Great Firewall,” relying now on self-censorship, situating the policeman within the mind of the dissident netizen.

Record companies and movie studios try to block distribution channels they can not control and can not tariff; every attempt to control distribution only results in an ever-more-pervasive and ever-more-difficult to detect “Darknet.”

A band of reporters and bloggers (some of whom are in this room today) took down the Attorney General of the United States, despite the best attempts of Washington’s political machinery to obfuscate then overload the processes of transparency and oversight. Each of these singular examples would have been literally unthinkable a decade ago, but today they are the facts on the ground, unmistakable signs of the potency of this new cultural order.

It is as though we have all been shoved into the same room, a post-modern Panopticon, where everyone watches everyone else, can speak with everyone else, can work with everyone else. We can send out a call to “find the others,” for any cause, and watch in wonder as millions raise their hands. Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule.

This shows up, at its most complete, in Wikipedia, which (warts and all) represents the first attempt to survey and capture the knowledge of the entire human race, rather than only its scientific and academic elites. A project of the mob, for the mob, and by the mob, Wikipedia is the mob rule of factual knowledge. Its phenomenal success demonstrates beyond all doubt how the calculus of civilization has shifted away from its Liberal basis. In Liberalism, knowledge is a scarce resource, managed by elites: the more scarce knowledge is, the more highly valued that knowledge, and the elites which conserve it. Wikipedia turns that assertion inside out: the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes. These newly disproportionate returns on the investment in altruism now trump the ‘virtue of selfishness.’

Paradoxically, Wikipedia is not at all democratic, nor is it actually transparent, though it gives the appearance of both. Investigations conducted by The Register in the UK and other media outlets have shown that the “encyclopedia anyone can edit” is, in fact, tightly regulated by a close network of hyperconnected peers, the “Wikipedians.”

This premise is borne out by the unpleasant fact that article submissions to Wikipedia are being rejected at an ever-increasing rate. Wikipedia’s growth has slowed, and may someday grind to a halt, not because it has somehow encompassed the totality of human knowledge, but because it is the front line of a new kind of warfare, a battle both semantic and civilizational. In this battle, we can see the tracings of hyperpolitics, the politics of era of hyperconnectivity.

To outsiders like myself, who critique their increasingly draconian behavior, Wikipedians have a simple response: “We are holding the line against chaos.” Wikipedians honestly believe that, in keeping Wikipedia from such effluvia as endless articles on anime characters, or biographies of living persons deemed “insufficiently notable,” they keep their resource “pure.” This is an essentially conservative impulse, as befits the temperament of a community of individuals who are, at heart, librarians and archivists.

The mechanisms through which this purity is maintained, however, are hardly conservative.

Hyperconnected, the Wikipedians create “sock puppet” personae to argue their points on discussion pages, using back-channel, non-transparent communications with other Wikipedians to amass the support (both numerically and rhetorically) to enforce their dictates. Those who attempt to counter the fixed opinion of any network of Wikipedians encounter a buzz-saw of defiance, and, almost invariably, withdraw in defeat.

Now that this ‘Great Game’ has been exposed, hypermimesis comes into play. The next time an individual or community gets knocked back, they have an option: they can choose to “go nuclear” on Wikipedia, using the tools of hyperconnectivity to generate such a storm of protest, from so many angles of attack, that the Wikipedians find themselves overwhelmed, backed into the buzz-saw of their own creation.

This will probably engender even more conservative reaction from the Wikipedians, until, in fairly short order, the most vital center of human knowledge creation in the history of our species becomes entirely fossilized.

Or, just possibly, Wikipedians will bow to the inevitable, embrace the chaos, and find a way to make it work.

That choice, writ large, is the same that confronts us in every aspect of our lives. The entire human social sphere faces the increasing pressures of hyperconnectivity, which arrive hand-in-hand with an increasing empowerment (‘hyperempowerment’) by means of hypermimesis. All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the Liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw.

Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos.

Part Three: No Governor

Last Monday, as I waited at San Francisco International for a flight to Logan, I used my mobile to snap some photos of the status board (cheerfully informing me of my delayed departure), which I immediately uploaded to Flickr. As I waited at the gate, I engaged in a playful banter with two women d’un certain age, that clever sort of casual conversation one has with fellow travelers. After we boarded the flight, one of the women approached me. “I just wanted you to know, that other woman, she works for the Treasury Department. And you were making her nervous when you took those photos.”

Now here’s the thing: I wanted to share the frustrations of my journey with my many friends, both in Australia and America, who track my comings and goings on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. Sharing makes the unpleasant endurable. In that moment of confrontation, I found myself thrust into a realization that had been building over the last four years: Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing.

A photo snapped on my mobile becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible. No wonder she’s nervous: in my simple, honest and entirely human act of sharing, it becomes immediately apparent that any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power have already collapsed into shell-shocked impotence.

We are asked to believe that hyperconnectivity can be embraced by political campaigns, and by politicians in power. We are asked to believe that everything we already know to be true about the accelerating disintegration of hierarchies of all kinds – economic, academic, cultural – will somehow magically suspend itself for the political process. That, somehow, politics will be different.

Bullshit. Ladies and gentlemen, don’t believe a word of it. It’s whistling past the graveyard. It’s clapping for Tinkerbelle. Obama may be the best thing since sliced bread, but this isn’t a crisis of leadership. This is not an emergency. And my amateur photography did not bring down the curtain on the Republic.

For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned, human techniques), then activated it to compete in the primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the Democratic nomination. That network is being activated again to win the general election.

Then what? Three months ago, I put this question directly to an Obama field organizer. He paused, as if he’d never given the question any thought, before answering, “I don’t know. I don’t believe anyone’s thought that far ahead.” There are now some statements from candidate Obama about what he’d like to see this network become. They are, of course, noble sentiments. They matter not at all. The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, can encourage or scold as occasion warrants, but he can not control. Not with all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.

And yes, that’s scary.

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” A hyperconnected polity – whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand – has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.

Conserved across nearly four thousand generations, the social fabric will warp and convulse as various polities actualize their hyperempowerment in the cultural equivalent of nuclear exchanges. Eventually (one hopes, with hypermimesis, rather quickly) we will learn to contain these most explosive forces. We will learn that even though we can push the button, we’re far better off refraining. At that point, as in the era of superpower Realpolitik, the action will shift to a few tens of thousands of ‘little’ conflicts, the hyperconnected equivalents of the endless civil wars which plagued Asia, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War.

Naturally, governments will seek to control and mediate these emerging conflicts. This will only result in the guns being trained upon them. The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously pronounced that we should “Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.” Mead spoke truthfully, and prophetically. We are all committed, we are all passionate. We merely lacked the lever to effectively translate the force of our commitment and passion into power. That lever has arrived, in my hand and yours.

And now, the world’s going to move – for all of us.

Slides for the presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum are now available on SlideShare.

Recorded at “The Digital Education Revolution”, Adelaide, on Monday 2 Monday 2008. It’s a video presentation of the talk that was published on this blog.

Many thanks to the folks at the Australian Council for Educational Research, Education.AU, and Kerryank for her most awesome audio recording.

In November of 1998, I attended a conference on technology and design in Amsterdam, and brought along two mates itching for an excuse to visit Europe. We all stayed at the flat of my good friends, Neil and Kylin. I dutifully attended the conference every day as the rest of them went out carousing through the various less-reputable quarters of Amsterdam, and we all had a great time. As Kylin tells it – given that she was the only woman on this Cook’s Tour – when we departed, we left a lingering residue of testosterone in their flat, and (if they calculated correctly) the very day after we departed for Los Angeles, they conceived their daughter Bey.

In February 1999, Neil and Kylin emailed all their friends, telling us of their plans to move – immediately – from Amsterdam to Florida. No explanation given. Through some weird intuition, I figured it out: Kylin was pregnant. I called her, and put the question to her directly. “How did you know?” she gasped. “We’ve been keeping it top secret.”

I don’t know how I knew. But I was overjoyed: I’m part of a generation who waited a long, long time to have children – my own nephews weren’t born until 2001 and 2002; none of my close friends had children in 1999. Neil and Kylin were the first.

It got me to pondering, as I ran a little thought experiment: what would the world of their daughter, still in utero, look like? What would her experience of that world be?

A month earlier, my friend Terence McKenna had challenged me to write a book. “You mouth off enough,” he suggested, “so maybe you should get it all down?” When he laid that challenge before me, I had no idea what I’d write a book about.

Somehow, as soon as I heard about Kylin’s pregnancy, I knew. I had to write a book about the world that child would grow up into, because that world would look nothing like the world I had been born into back in 1962. That child wouldn’t need this book. Her parents would.

A few months later I attended another conference, at MIT, where I heard psychologist Sherry Turkle talk about her work with young children. Turkle has been exploring how technology changes children’s behaviors, and, in this specific case, she’d taken a long look at a brand new toy: in fact, that season’s “hot” toy, the “Furby”.

Furby is an electromechanical plush toy, capable of responding to various actions by the child, but Furby also presents the child with demands – to be fed, to be played with, to be put to sleep when tired. More than interactive, the Furby presented children with some of the qualities we recognize as innate to living things. Would a small child recognize furby as inanimate, like a doll, or animate, like a pet?

From research in developmental psychology we know that children develop the categories of “inanimate” and “animate” when they’re around four years old. The development of these categories is a “constructivist” process – children do not need to be taught the difference between these two states; rather, they intuit the difference through continued interactions with animate and inanimate objects. Thus, an object, like Furby, which displays characteristics associated with both categories, should pose quite a philosophical conundrum for a small child.

Turkle put the question to these children: is Furby like your puppy? Is it like your doll? These children, little philosophical geniuses, gave her an answer she never expected to receive. They said it’s like neither of them. It is a thing itself, something in-between. They had no name for this third category between animate and inanimate, but they knew it existed, for they had direct experience of it.

This was my penny-drop moment: constructivism states that all children learn how the world works through their interactions within it. And we had suddenly changed the rules. We had infused the material world with the fairy dust of interactivity, creating the Pinocchio-like Furby, and, in so doing, at created a new ontological category. It is not a category that adults acknowledge – in fact, many adults find Furby slightly “creepy” precisely because it straddles two very familiar categories – but, in another generation, by the time these children are our age, that category will have a name, and will be accepted as a matter of course.

This is what Neil and Kylin – and, really, parents everywhere – need to know: the world has changed, the world is changing, and the world’s going to change a whole lot more. We may be the first beneficiaries of this great upwelling of technology, but the lasting benefits will be conferred upon our posterity, for it is changing the way they think. Their understanding to the world is, in some ways, utterly different from our own. And, just now, just over the last year or two, we’ve thrown a new element into the mix. We’re gracing ourselves with a new kind of connectivity – I call it “hyperconnectivity” which turbocharges some of the most essential features of human beings. This newest frontier – which did not exist even a decade ago – is what I want to focus upon this morning.

I: Who Are We?

We human beings are smart. Very smart. So smart we run the joint. But there’s a heavy price to be paid for all those brains. To start with, our heads our so big that we very nearly kill our mothers in the act of giving birth. Human births are so dangerous that we’re the only species we know of which can’t handle the act of birth alone.

We need others around – historically, other women – assisting us in the process. This point is essential to our humanity: we need other people. There is no way that a human, alone, can survive.

Yes, there are a few isolated incidence of “wolf boys” and Robinson Crusoe-types, battling against the odds in an indifferent or inimical environment, but, for far longer than we have been human, we have been social.

You can go back through the tree of life, a full eleven million years, to Proconsul, the common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, and that animal was a social animal. It’s in our genes. It’s what we are. But why?

The answer is simple enough: eleven million years ago, those of our ancestors with the best social skills could most dependably count on help from others. That help was essential to their survival. That help allowed them to live long enough to pass those social genes and social behaviors along to their children. That help was essential, once our brains grew big enough to create trouble in the birth canal, for the next generation of human beings to come into the world. Cleverly, nature has crafted a species which, from the moment of the first birth pangs, must be social in order to survive. That pressure – a “selection pressure”, as it’s known in biology – is probably the essential, defining feature of humanity.

In an article in the May 17 2008 issue of New Scientist, an author rhapsodized about the end of “human exceptionalism”. Ethology and zoology have taught us that all of the behaviors we consider uniquely human do, in fact, exist broadly among other species. Whales have culture, of a sort. Chimpanzees use gestures to communicate their needs and wants, just like a child does. Dolphins have names. But each of these species, smart as they may be, deliver their young unassisted. They do not need help from their fellows to enter this world.

We are delivered by social means, and live our entire lives in a social order. What was essential at birth becomes even more important as an infant and toddler: because of our huge brains we remain helpless far longer than any other species.

A mother caring for a newborn infant has a full-time task on her hands. She can not devote her energies to finding food or shelter. Her attention is divided, but mostly focused on her child. Here again, the strong bonds of socialization create an environment where women (again) will altruistically bear some of the burden for mother and newborn. This altruism is reciprocal: as other women bear children, these mothers, with older children, will bear some of the burden for them.

This means that the mothers best able to forge strong social bonds with other women will have the most help at hand when they need it. This means, al things being equal, their children will be more likely to survive, and the chain of genes and behaviors gets passed along to another generation. This is another selection pressure which has, over millions of years, turned us into thoroughly social animals.

An interesting point to note here is that women have always had stronger selection pressures toward social behavior than men. I will come back to this.

Given that so much of our success is based upon our ability to socialize with others, and given that additional social skills confer additional advantage which increases selection success, as we evolved into our modern form – Homo Sapiens Sapiens – natural selection tended to emphasize our social characteristics. Being social has ever been the best way to get ahead.

In the last million years, as our brains grew explosively – as one scientist put it, “perhaps the most improbable event in all of evolution, anywhere” – much of the potential of all that new gray matter was put to work for social benefit. The “new brain” or neocortex, which is the most dramatically enlarged portion of the human brain, seems to be the area dedicated to our social relationships.

We know this because, in 1992, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar compared the average troop size of gorillas and chimpanzees against the average tribe sizes of humans. He found that there was a direct correlation between the volume of the neocortex in these three species and their average troop or tribe size. This value, known as “Dunbar’s Number”, is roughly 20 for gorillas, who have the smallest neocortex, about 35 for chimpanzees, and – for us lucky human beings, who have the greatest selection pressures on our social behavior – just under one hundred and fifty. We may not be entirely exceptional, but we’re doing quite well.

Essentially, inside of each one of our heads, there are a hundred and fifty other people running around. Yes, that sounds a bit crowded (particularly when they’re up partying all night long with their mates), but it’s actually imminently practical. These “little people” inside our heads are models of each person we know well: our family, our friends, our colleagues. For each of these people we build mental model which helps us to predict their behavior. (It isn’t really them, but rather, our image of them.) This predictive capability smoothes our social interactions. We know how to interact with people whom we have in our heads; with others we remain demure, reserved – in a word, predictable. Only with intimacy do we express the quirks of behavior which make us unique, only with intimacy do we take note of them in others.

We all know more than a hundred and fifty people. Some folks on FaceBook and MySpace claim thousands of “friends”. But most of these folks aren’t in our heads. There’s a simple rule you can use, to tell whether one of these folks is in your head: I call it the “sharing test”. Let’s suppose you see something – on the Web, in the newspaper, on the telly – that is so meaningful (funny, or poignant, or just so salient to whatever passions drive you), and in the next moment you think, “Wow, I know Dazza would really enjoy that.” And you flip the link along in an email. Or you send Dazza a text message with, “Hey, mate, did you see that thing just now on TEN?” And if he didn’t see it, you ring and fill him in. It’s that moment of unrestrained sharing – it feels almost automatic, and it’s entirely an essential part of what we are – which defines the most visible quality of those people inside our heads.

Every time when we share something with those little people in our head, we reinforce that relationship; we strengthen the social bonds which tie us to one another. Fifty thousand years ago this had enormous practical benefits: sharing where the best fruit grew – or the location of a predator in the tall grass – kept everyone alive and healthy. The selection pressure for sociability made us expert at sharing.

It’s interesting to watch this behavior as expressed by children; in some ways they share automatically – children love to share their experiences. In other situations – such as with a favorite toy – children must be taught to share, to override the natural selfishness of the singular animal, overruling that intrinsic behavior with the altruistic behavior of the social human. Sharing is one of the most important lessons parents teach their children, and if that lesson is poorly taught, it leaves a child at a permanent disadvantage.

While our genes make us sociable, our sharing behaviors are more software than hardware; this is why they must be taught. It takes time for any child to learn that lesson, just as it took quite a while for humans, as a species, to learn it. Geneticists know that human beings haven’t changed at all in at least 60,000 years, but civilization didn’t kick off in a meaningful way until about ten thousand years ago.

This has been an a bit of a puzzler for paleoanthropologists, but a new theory – which I also read about in New Scientist – seems to make sense of that gap: while we had the raw capacity for civilized behavior long ago, it took us 50,000 years to write the cultural software for civilization. Over those years, as we learned about ourselves and our world, our behavior changed and we taught these changes to our children, who improved upon them, passing those changes along.

In short, our entire species spent a long time in primary school (and might even have been kept back a few grades) before graduation. The incredible wealth of cultural learning – which we don’t really even reflect on, because it seems so essential and obvious to us – was painstaking developed across two thousand generations.

Our secondary studies, as a species, included that most unique of human institutions: the city. The earliest cities, such as Jericho and Çatal Höyük, already housed thousands of inhabitants – far beyond the reach of Dunbar’s Number.

That in itself presented a singular challenge for humanity, because, as near as we can tell, humans in pre-civilization lived in a perpetual state of war – the “war of all against all” – waged against all those not in their own tribes.

At the end of May 2008, we saw photos of a newly discovered tribe in the far reaches of the Amazon, who reacted to the presence of an aircraft by firing bows at it. Human beings possess an inherent xenophobia, and the boundaries those in the “in group” conform to the limits of Dunbar’s Number.

Given this, how did we all come to live together in ever-greater numbers? Simply this: the cultural software of civilization provided a greater selection advantage than that afforded by the tribal order which preceded it. Civilization is a broader form of sharing, where altruism is replaced by roles: the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. In civilization we share the manifold burdens of life by specializing, then we trade these specialized goods and services amongst ourselves. And it works.

Civilized human beings live in greater numbers, with greater population density, than pre-civilized cultures. It does not work perfectly: we have crime and poverty precisely because there are people in our cities who can fall through the “safety net” of civilized society. These eternal blights are the specific diseases of civilization. Yet the upsides of this broader and more diffuse form of sharing so outweighed the downsides that these evils have been tacitly acknowledged as the “price of progress.”

So things continued, merrily, for the last ten thousand years. Cities rose and fell; empires rose and fell; cultures and languages and entire peoples rose up suddenly, only to vanish just as quickly. All along the way, we continued adding to our cultural software. We learned – fairly early on – to record our learning in permanent form. We codified the essential elements of the software of civilization in laws and commandments.

We experimented with every form of human social organization, from the military dictatorship of Sparta, to the centralized bureaucracy of China, to the open democracy of Athens, to the chaotic anarchism of the Paris Commune. At each step along the way, we passed these lessons along, in a unbroken chain, to the generations that followed.

We are the children of nearly five hundred generations of civilization. The lessons learned over that immense span of time have brought us to the threshold of a revolution as comprehensive as that which obsolesced our tribal natures and replaced them with more civilized forms. Once again, the selection pressures of sociability force us into a narrow passage, toward another birth.

II: Where Are We Going?

We know that our amazingly comprehensive social skills are located in the newest part of our brain; we also know that they are among the last capabilities to mature during our cognitive development. Our sociability depends upon so much: a strong command of language, the ability to empathize and sympathize, the ability to consider the wants and needs of others, the ability to give freely of one’s self – altruism. At any point this complex and delicate process can be interrupted, by nature or by nurture.

My own nephew, Alexander, was diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder at the end of 2005. For leading-edge brain researchers, autism represents a natural failure of the brain’s inherent capability to model the behavior of others. The hundred and fifty people running around inside of the head of someone with an Autism Spectrum Disorder are shaped differently than the ones running about in mine; they still exist, but they are not (in an admittedly subjective assessment) as complete. Now that we know roughly what autism is, we work with these children intensively, because, while they lack certain inherent features we associate with normalcy, these children, if diagnosed early enough, can learn to become much more sensitive to the world-views and feelings of others.

My nephew attended a state-of-the-art pre-school in his San Diego suburb, where autistic children and “normal” children (such as his year-younger brother, Andrew) mix freely, because it is now known that the autistic children can and will learn necessary social skills through this continuous interaction. Alexander has now been mainstreamed, while my younger nephew remains as a “peer” in this school, showing other children how to be a fully socialized human being.

Then there are the children who have suffered neglect or abuse. Not having been nurtured themselves, they have not learned how to nurture others. This deficit manifests as emotional withdrawal, or in anti-social behaviors. Children who have not received love can not find it within themselves to love others. It is not that love is learned, per se, but rather, that we learn to recognize it as others demonstrate it toward us. The drive to connect with another human being, although entirely inherent, can be so confused, or so atrophied through disuse (these areas of the brain, if under-stimulated, will die away, leaving the child with a permanent deficit), that the child essentially becomes locked into a solitary world, unable to initiate or maintain the social relationships essential to success.

None of us are perfect; all of us feel embarrassment and disappointment and awkwardness in a range of social situations. Yet those sensations, of themselves, are proof our normalcy: we sense our social shortcomings. We had little awareness of our social nature when we were young. Only as we matured, turning the corner into tweenhood, did we rise into an awareness of the strong social bonds which form the largest part of our experience as human beings. For each and every one of us, this is a painful experience.

The brain, furiously making connections between regions which have been developing from before birth, integrates our comprehensive understanding of human behavior, our own emotional state, and our perceptions of the actions and emotions of others to create a model of how we are viewed by others, our “social standing”. It is this that natural selection has driven us to optimize: individuals with the highest social standing get the lion’s share of attention, affection and resources.

In particular, this burden lies heaviest on young women, who have the additional selection pressure (now more-or-less vestigial) driving them to form the social bonds of altruism with their peers which would, in prehistoric times, lead to greater help with childbearing and child-rearing. Young women emerge into a social consciousness so rich and so complex it makes young men look nearly autistic in comparison.

It is the reason why young woman invest themselves so wholly in their looks, in their friends, in their cliques, in the “in group” and the “out group”. Films like Heathers (one of my personal favorites) and Mean Girls tell tales as old as humanity: the rise into social consciousness of that most social of all the animals on the planet – the young woman.

It also provides some explanation for why young women are often emotionally overwrought. It isn’t just hormones. It’s the rising awareness of a vast social game that they don’t know how to play, with rules taught only through trial and error. Every mistake is potentially fatal, every success fleeting. And each of these moments of singular significance are amplified by a genetic imperative, a drive to connect, which leaves them helpless. Resistance is futile, and engagement only brings more learning, and more pain.

Oh, and we just made things a whole lot more complicated.

This generation of young adults, coming of age just now, have access to the best tools for connection and communication created by our species.

A few years ago, these kids, bounded by proximity and temporality, took their cues from their immediate peers. But now these connections can be forged via text messages, or MySpace pages, or YouTube videos, and so on. An average fifteen year-old girl might send and receive a hundred text messages in a single day and think nothing of it. Her inherent drive to connect has been freed from space and time; she can reach out everywhere, at any time; she can be reached anywhere, anytime. We have added a technological dimension – an intense and comprehensive acceleration – to a wholly natural process.

During the two hundred years of the industrial revolution, we amplified our capability for physical work. Steam engines and electric motors replaced muscle. As we moved from physical labor to monitoring and control of our machines, our capacity for work exploded, transforming the world. Still, these changes were entirely external. They did not affect our nature as social beings, but simply extended our physical capabilities. Now – just now – we have moved beyond the physical extension of our capabilities into a comprehensive amplification of our social nature. The mobile and the Internet are already transforming the human world as utterly as the steam engine transformed the landscape; but this transformation is happening in eighth-time.

The transition to industrialization, which took about a hundred years to complete, seems slow when compared to the rise of the Human Network, which will take about fifteen years, end-to-end.

Already, half of humanity owns a mobile phone; within about three years, three-quarters of the planet will own a mobile. That’s everyone except for the most desperately poor among us. No one, anywhere, expected this, because no one reckoned on this most basic of all human drives – the need to connect. The mobile is the steam engine, the electric motor, and the internal combustion engine of the 21st century: every bit of the potential framed by each of these enormous innovations now rests comfortably in the palm of three and a half billion hands.

Getting the tools for the amplification of our social natures is only half the story. That’s just hardware. What really counts is the software. And that’s why we turn, at the end of this tale, to Bey, the child conceived by Neil and Kylin, back in the last days of 1998.

III: Who Will Lead the Way?

Hardware is not enough. We spent fifty thousand years in idle, despite the best cognitive hardware on the planet, before anything truly interesting occurred. We are ensuring that every single person on Earth has a connection to the Human Network, but that doesn’t mean any of us know how to use it. Still, we are learning. And humans excel at learning from one another.

A recent study run with young chimps and toddlers showed that the chimps surpassed the toddlers in their cognitive capabilities, but that the toddlers far surpassed the chimpanzees in their ability to “ape” behavior. Humans learn by mimesis: the observation of our parents, our peers, our mentors and teachers. (Which is why the injunction, “Do as I say, not as I do,” never works.) As such, we closely observe each other to learn what works, and we copy it. This mimetic behavior, which used to be constrained by distance, has itself become a global phenomenon. Whatever works gets copied widely. It could be a good behavior, or a bad behavior: the only metric is the success of the behavior. If it achieves its ends, it will be observed and copied, widely and nearly instantaneously.

It took us two thousand generations to build up the cognitive software for civilization, as individual tribes made the same discoveries, independently, but lacked the means to share them. Even the diffusion of agriculture depended more on the migration of whole peoples than the dissemination of knowledge.

Today, a clever tip finds its way onto YouTube in minutes, a rumor can sweep through a nation in the time it takes to forward a text message, and a blog post can cut billions off the valuation of a publicly listed firm. We are “hyperconnected,” but, newly delivered into this state of being, we are still quite immature.

We know how to be social beings, but never before have we been globally and instantaneously social. For this reason, we are learning – and each of are intensely involved in this education. We are learning from ourselves, applying the lessons of our own socialization, to see if these lessons work in this new world. That’s pure constructivism. We are learning from each other, watching our peers as intently as any young woman would, when desperately trying to defend her position in an ever-more-competitive social circle. That’s pure mimesis. Together they’re a potent combination, and, when multiplied by the accelerator of the Human Network, it means we’re learning very rapidly indeed. Learning is never complete: ignorance is a permanent feature of the human condition. That said, competence can come quickly, when the students are wholly engaged in learning. As we are.

This means that, in another two or three years, when Bey is old enough to get her first mobile phone, at precisely the moment that she begins to awaken to her intense cognitive capabilities as social animal, those abilities will have been so comprehensively rewritten and transformed by the new software of sociability that she will find herself suddenly both intensely empowered and, most likely, entirely overwhelmed.

Bey will be among the first children who become socially aware within a world where the definition, rules and operating principles of the social universe have utterly changed. That transformation will not be complete, by any means, but it will be far enough along that the basic features and outlines of 21st century social civilization will be present.

This is the only social world that she will ever know. For her, social connections will not end with the classroom and the home. Social connectivity is already edging toward a state where everyone is directly connected to everyone else, all six point eight billion of us, a world where each of us can directly forge a relationship with everyone else. Bey will not know any of the boundaries we consider natural and solid, the boundaries of the classroom, the suburb, the family, or the nation: under the pressure of this intense hyperconnectivity, all of those boundaries dissolve, or are blown over. Only connect. Connection is all that matters. The social instinct, hyperempowered and taken to an entirely new level by hyperconnectivity, is rewriting the rules of culture.

This world looks utterly alien to us, yet it is already here. Author William Gibson says, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” We have moments of hyperconnectivity – as in the thirty-six hours after the Sichuan earthquake, when text messaging and other tools for hyperconnectivity spontaneously created a Human Network, sharing news of the tragedy and working to locate missing people. Such moments are becoming more frequent, gradually merging into a continuum.

But what about Bey? What lessons can we offer her? She will learn everything she can from everyone, everywhere. She will span the planet for best practices in sociability, because she can, and because she must. She will outpace us in every way, because the simultaneous emergence of the Human Network and her own social capabilities makes her potent in ways we can’t wholly predict. Her powers will be greater, but that also means that her crash will be more spectacular – apocalyptic, really – when she tries something, and fails.

We do know this: just as Furby created a new ontological class of being, a nether zone between animate and inanimate which children instinctively recognized and embraced, Bey will be living a new ontology of sociability, connection and relationship. These girls, just on the verge of becoming young women, will lead the way into this new world. They will be the first masters of the Human Network.

I want to close this essay with both a warning — and a hope. The warning is simply this: these young women will be vastly more powerful than we are. Harnessing the immense energies of the Human Network will be, quite literally, child’s play to them. If they sense they are being wronged, and can build a network of peers who concur in this assessment, you will need to watch out, because they will have the capacity to destroy you with a word. We already see students threatening educators with damage to their reputations; multiply that a billion-fold and you can sense the potential for catastrophe. I am not saying that this will inevitably happen, only that it can.

At the same time, despite their thermonuclear potential, it would be a mistake to handle these kids too delicately. Children are all passion, but lack wisdom. Adults have plenty of wisdom, but, all too often, we lack passion.

We need to build strong relationships with these children, using the Human Network of hyperconnectivity, so that each of us can infect the other. We need their passion to move forward without fear in a world where the human universe has shifted beneath our feet. They desperately need our wisdom to guide them into healthy and stable relationships throughout the Human Network. To do this, we need to bring these kids inside our heads, and we need to get ourselves into theirs, so that, together, we can make sense of a world so new, and so different, that we all seem but little children in a big world.

My presentation at Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival, on the panel “Friends I’ve Never Known”, with Christian McCrea, Dani Kirby, Alex Gibson and myself, all talking about different aspects of this hyperconnected era.

Please note that my language is a little raw in this presentation - not suitable for young children.

To say that we’re living in a time of accelerated change is a truism. What we forget – because it would scare the hell out of us – is exactly how much change we’ve seen. I moved to Australia 4 ½ years ago. When I got here there was no YouTube, no podcasting, no BitTorrent, no Wikipedia (in a practical sense). And no MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo, or Twitter.

These are things that I, in my daily life, take for granted. But they’re absolutely brand new. I’m not quite sure how we manage to fool ourselves into believing this is all perfectly normal.

Of course, there is one group of people for whom this is perfectly normal, because they’ve never known anything else – those wacky kids. Consider: I had my very first tour of the World Wide Web at SIGGRAPH, the big computer graphics conference, in Anaheim, California, back in July, 1993. I moused around the recently-released NCSA Mosaic on a hundred-thousand dollar graphics workstation.

I already knew what hypertext was. I had already written a Macintosh-based hypertext system, just before Hypercard made it completely irrelevant. I knew what I was looking at. And I wasn’t very impressed. Sure, it was hypertext, but there were only a handful of sites to visit.

Eventually, the penny dropped. A few months later I bought a used, huge and heavy SPARCStation, set it up in my lounge room, strung a phone cable across my flat, SLIPped into the Internet, launched NSCA Mosaic, and started surfing. Every night when I got home from work, I surfed some more. And, at the end of that very enjoyable week in mid-October 1993, I was done. I had surfed the entire Web.

If you said that today – that you’d surfed the entire web of a hundred million discrete domains and a hundred and fifty million individual blogs and – who knows? – maybe twenty billion pages – people would either believe you a liar or mad as a cut snake.

And yet, a child, born in July 1993, when I first clicked on a Web link, would just be coming up to her 15th birthday. Probably in the middle of year 10.

For that fifteen year-old, change is the only constant she’s known. All the world has changed. All of culture and human behavior have changed – in some ways we are unrecognizable. Because we are embedded in this change, we only feel the acceleration. To someone whose baseline experience, their entire lifetime, has been this continuous acceleration, there is no sensation at all.

People talk about digital immigrants and digital natives. But that’s too simple. It’s an injustice to the truth of the matter – a truth which is important for us to understand.

In the late 1990s, I’d gotten a sense of what was going on, and wrote a book to usher parents into the world of their children: The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination took a look at three areas – intelligence, activity and presence. For each of these domains of human experience, I selected a toy – the Furby, Lego’s MINDSTORMS, and the Sony PlayStation2, respectively – as the starting point for an explanation of this startling shift in the inner lives of children.

Let me be clear: I am a strict Constructivist. I believe that children learn through interactions with their environment. I had come to realize that the environment for a child born at the turn of the millennium looked nothing like the world of 1962, the year I was born.

The world is intelligent. The world responds. The world allows us to extend our senses globally – as with Google Earth – or down to the nanoscopic. All of this – all of it – was already showing up in children’s toys! Not in fancy labs, but in toys. And it’s still going on today. The Nintendo Wii is a better bit of virtual reality than anything ever created by NASA.

How can a kid who plays tennis with a virtual racket, or bowls with a virtual ball, ever hope to have the same cognitive relationship to the world of things that I do?

We’re not even on the same planet.

And we forget this. Or rather, we refuse to see it. But we can’t avoid it any longer, because all this tech has turned this sub-15 generation into mutants with strange new powers.

Let’s come back to that 15 year-old, who, of course, owns a mobile phone. What does she do with it? Those of you with teenage children already know the answer: she texts. Continuously.

Mizuko Ito, a Japanese researcher, studied teenagers in Japan a few years ago, and found that these kids – from the moment they wake up in the morning, until they drop off to sleep at night – are enaged in a continuous and mostly trival conversation with, on average, five other friends. They might be in the flat next door, or on the other side of Tokyo. Proximity doesn’t matter. What does matter is the constant connection. Ito named this phenomenon “co-presence”. It seemed a bit too science-fiction wacky-technophile Japanese, at the time.

Today, it’s the standard operating procedure for all teenagers everywhere in the developed world.

That typical 15 year-old will blow her prepay budget on texts, up to a hundred a day – which works out to about 6 every waking hour – and then, as the credit runs out, and the flow of messages stops, friends will check MySpace, where the 15 year-old has gone, to message for free, and so the flow of co-presence continues.

In some ways, this looks like a new thing, but in reality, it isn’t. It’s an old thing – a very old thing – expressed in an entirely new way.

All of this comes down to what we really are: social animals. That means we live to communicate, and we appear to be better at communication than any other species on the planet.

What we’ve done is given those wacky kids the tools to free this communication, so that it is no longer bound in space and time. We’ve accelerated communication to the speed of light. And all of this is perfectly natural to them.

This much we know.

It’s the unintended, unexpected, unpredictable consequences of all this “hyperconnectivity” which are really putting the screws to us. This is the new stuff. The things that are coming at us from our blind spot.

Consider: 11 December 2005, Cronulla Beach, and every Anglo-Celtic White Supremacist in New South Wales has a text message in hand, forwarded from fellow traveler to fellow traveler, asking them to lend a hand in the beat-down of the Lebs.

That’s what happens when you connect everyone together.

Consider: Also in December 2005, Nature published a peer-reviewed article which stated that Wikipedia, the peer-produced encyclopedia made possible by the fact that half a billion people can connect to it and contribute to it (and, through it, to each others’ thoughts and expertise), is very nearly as accurate as that gold-standard reference work, Encyclopedia Britannica.

Twist the dials one way, you get Cronulla. Twist them another, and you get Wikipedia.

And we’ve given those wacky kids the dial.

II: Those Well-Meaning Adults

These “hyperconnected” and ever-more wacky kids get up in the morning, put on their uniforms and go to school. When they get there, they’ve got to turn off their mobiles, put away their iPods, close the chat windows, unplug themselves from the webs of co-presence which shape their social experiences, sit still and listen to teacher.

And they’ve got to do this inside of an environment – the classroom – which is so thoroughly disconnected from the rest of life as they have always known it that it must, deep in their co-present souls, resemble nothing so much as a medieval torture chamber. An isolation tank. Solitary confinement.

It’s not just that school is a pain in the ass. It’s that it looks – to them – like a completely unrealistic pain in the ass, one which is out of step with the world beyond the classroom walls. It’s as if, every morning, these kids are marched into a time machine which transports them back to 1955.

It’s always important to recognize the hidden elements in any curriculum. The modern school was created not only to produce a literate workforce, but one which understood schedules and timelines, essential elements in the industrial era. Bells and periods trained students in the implicit curriculum. They learned to be timely and orderly, while they explicitly learned their letters and numbers. These curricula – explicit and implicit - fit the needs of the industrial age, and so were highly successful.

So, kids today, stripped of their hyperconnectivity as they walk through the school house door, learn that while timeliness is important, the ability to communicate, to collaborate, share and participate – across time and distance – are not. Oh, we can have practice exercises and whatnot which help to encourage those capabilities, but the hidden curriculum of our schools implicitly denies the value of this experience –the greater part of life experience for those wacky kids.

The trouble with this state of affairs is that it directly contradicts the world these kids have always lived in. In the industrial age, they saw their fathers leave home in time for the morning shift, and return home when that shift was completed. Their experience of regimented time within school perfectly agreed with life at home.

These days, those two worlds have almost nothing in common. Parents work flextime, they telecommute, work all hours of the day or night, across nations, across time zones, across disciplines. Work has changed. Home life has changed. School has not.

This is a very dangerous state of affairs, because in this subtle and invisible argument between school and life as it is really lived, life is always going to win.

What this means, in a practical sense, is that students have lost respect for the classroom, because it has no relevance to their lives. Yes, they will be polite – as they’re polite to their grandparents – but that is no substitute for a real working relationship. School will be endured, because parents and state mandate it. But it’s a waiting game.

This is not the right way to create the next generation of Australia’s leaders. This is only going to create a generation who have learned how to be patient, patronizing, and excel in the art of ass-kissing.

Australia is not alone in this. In the United States, the No Child Left Behind program, the very epitome of Industrial Age methodology, simply subjects students to assessment after meaningless assessment. Students train for tests. There are no more exploratory moments. Learning is by rote. Asia and Europe fare no better. Everywhere, everything is exactly the same — and exactly wrong.

What, then, is to be done?

It’s not as though educators and educational administrators are entirely unaware of this increasing desynchronization between the classroom and the world beyond it. Far form it. Just like those wacky kids, they live in both of these worlds, and they sense that the classroom has become an antique, a museum piece.

But they don’t know what to do about it.

That’s not to say they’re not grasping about for solutions. They are. The plan to get computers into secondary school classrooms throughout Australia is such an attempt. But no one has thought through what these computers will be used for, once they arrive on students’ desks. The Prime Minister, during the election campaign, uttered a few lines about maths drills and language exercises.

Yuk.

Probably Kevin Rudd should have sat and watched his own 14 year-old son as he goes online, or plays games on his Xbox, or texts his mates, to get a sense of the real value of all this hyperconnected technology.

Instead, Rudd relied on the opinions of educational experts, individuals who likely got their post-graduate degrees before there was a World Wide Web.

Hence: give the schools computers, but make them so dull, so meaningless, that the students are guaranteed to recoil in horror.

I have a better idea. Perhaps a school in Queensland can link up with a school in France, so that students learning English in France and students learning French in Australia can talk with each other, in foreign tongues. There are plenty of cheap technologies, like Skype and iChat AV, which can be used for that sort of thing.

Or, how about this: students in Victoria learning about the Eureka Stockade Rebellion might focus on a particular participant, and build a fully-researched and peer-reviewed article for Wikipedia. Teachers can go in and look at the history and discussion pages associated with the article to assess their students’ progress.

This isn’t about computers, folks. It’s about what we use computers for. And it’s about an educational administration that does not recognize that the computer, at its very best, is a window that opens up to other people. It is not a robot that drills students into submission.

All of this is light-years away from any curriculum in practice today. Yes, there are experiments – a few brave teachers and administrators sticking their necks out, tall poppies trying to make their classrooms relevant to the world outside. But these are just experiments.

Teachers are already so overworked, so time-poor, and, sometimes, so hide-bound, that technology is too frequently seen as a disruption. Actually, it’s the classroom that’s the disruption. What they see as a disruption is the outside world, clamoring to be let in.

The situation is bound to get worse before it gets better. The tabloid media are full of frightening stories of those wacky kids, inviting all their Facebook mates to come by and party, or MySpace suicide pacts, or cyber-bullying on YouTube.

And I say this knowing full well that I’m one of the pushers.

Although the schools need this technology, this window opening onto the real world, it is, at the same time, a profound threat to the comfortable, tried-and-true ways of doing business. When the computer salesman knocks on the door, they hear the rising winds of a storm that threatens to blow the classroom walls away.

So, something that should be an absolute no-brainer is turning out to be a very hard sell. People – teachers, administrators, parents and politicians – are afraid. When people are afraid, psychologists tell us, they put off making important decisions. They postpone change.

Those well-meaning adults, who really only want to get Australia’s next generation ready for a world that looks nothing like what they expected, are frozen in place, like Bambi in the headlights.

This will not do. It will not do for the kids. It will not do for the nation. And it will not do for you.

III. Breaking Through

Now, truth be told, I’m preaching to the converted. The reason you’re here in this room this morning listening to me rant and rave about those wacky kids and those well-meaning adults is because you want to be part of the solution. You’re voting with your feet. You understand that it’s important we do something – and do it quickly.

But we’re the mutants. We’re the ones who are out-of-step with the educational establishments in the states and the Commonwealth. We watch, with mixed degrees of amusement and horror, as the educational machinery shudders along, even as it groans under the increasing weight of the world outside. And we start to wonder – seriously – when it will all just collapse.

No one likes to set a deadline on these sorts of things; all deadlines inevitably fail. But I’d say that if we aren’t well on our way to transforming education within the next few years, the tide of the times could simply whip past us, and leave the educational establishment in a backwater, an eddy, while the rest of culture and civilization zips away downstream.

But, even as I say that, I reckon such an outcome to be very unikely. There’s too much pressure, coming from too many points, for education to get off that easily. It’s too important to be ignored or cast aside. Instead, the pressure will continue to rise, as the most extraordinary and unexpected things begin to happen. In fact, this is already happening.

I’d like to tell you a story about my colleague Stephen Collins, who lives and works down in Canberra. His story is a good example of how things are changing so quickly and so unexpectedly. But, before I tell you his story, I need to tell you the story of how I know Stephen Collins, because that will tell you something about just how fast things are moving right now.

Last year I signed up for a new Web service known as “Twitter”. Twitter bills itself as a “social message service” – sort of a cross between a social network (like Facebook or MySpace) and the short message service (or SMS) that we’re all completely familiar with. When I signed up to Twitter, I could elect to “follow” certain other people – that is, my friends, and colleagues, and so forth. When ever any of these people sends a “tweet” – that is, a 140-character message – I receive it, as do all of their followers. I might receive that tweet via the Twitter website, or one of the growing number of Twitter programs, or I can even have it delivered via SMS to my mobile.

I didn’t use Twitter very much for the first several months; there weren’t that many people using it, and weren’t that many folks to follow. So I ignored it. But, just in the last six months, a lot of people in Australia have discovered Twitter – particularly those folks who, like myself, are interested in what’s up-and-coming on the Web. Nearly all of those folks use Twitter these days, and most of them follow one another. I quickly got swept up into this madness, and am now very well “hyperconnected” with a few hundred core Twitter users in Sydney and throughout the nation.

The vast majority of tweets range from the minor to the inane. It’s like cocktail party chatter – often funny, but just as often, meaningless. But, once in a while – and more frequently, these days – there’s a point to all this incessant tweeting. For example, the Sichuan earthquake of Monday 12 May was reported by Twitterers in China a full thirty minutes before it made its way into the media. The folks who felt the temblor reported and shared their reports. Through Twitter, I knew about the earthquake an hour before most other Australians knew anything about it. In that moment of tragedy, Twitter became a human early warning system.

Over the next 24 hours, I closely followed the tweets of Dedric Lam, who lives in Shanghai, and who acted as a clearing house for a wide range of news reports, articles and videos about the earthquake. As major news organizations struggled to site reporters into the earthquake zone, I received a more consistent and more consistently accurate stream of news, directly from the people affected by the earthquake, via Twitter.

That’s interesting, and more important, it was completely unexpected. The folks who created Twitter thought they were creating a “microblogging” service – something where you’d be able to post short updates about your day. What we’ve turned it into – as we learn what it’s good for – is something completely different. Science fiction writer William Gibson once wrote, “The street finds its own use for things, uses the manufacturers never intended.” Twitter is a true street technology, and every day every one of its two hundred thousand core users find new ways to put its hyperconnective capabilities to work.

Twitter is how I came to know Stephen Collins. Stephen is one of the core Twitter users in Australia, a consultant, and power user of “social media”, as we’re now starting to call all these technologies of hyperconnectivity. He’s been tweeting for a year, and has used Twitter to both extend and reinforce his commercial and personal connections. I came to know of him soon after I got sucked into the Australian “Twitteratti”, and followed him, for he’s an individual who frequently makes keen observations.

On the same Monday that the Sichuan earthquake occurred, Stephen came to Sydney for the day, to speak at Interesting South, a local lecture series. Through Twitter, we arranged an afternoon coffee in the Strand Arcade, and chatted away amiably enough, griping about how people just aren’t “getting” social media.

Then he related an interesting story.

Stephen sends his 10 year-old daughter to Canberra’s St. Clare of Assisi Primary School, where she gets “the best education I can afford to give her,” as he wryly puts it. St. Clare of Assisi Primary is a big school – the largest private primary school in the ACT, at 730 kids. Never the passive parent, Stephen has grown progressively more involved in the affairs of St. Clare of Assisi, and found himself, this January – almost inadvertently – elected to the position of Secretary to the Board of the school.

Gah, you must be thinking: what a thankless task. Sit there and take notes at all the meetings. Dull as. And so it would have been, were Stephen a less inventive sort. Instead, during his first meeting, he had a penny-drop moment: rather than just writing up all these notes and sending out a sheaf of emails, he could type all of this information into a ‘wiki’ – that is, a user-editable website, and the technological basis for Wikipedia – so that everyone on the board could have access to his notes, make additional notes, start wiki entries on their own topics, and so on.

Wikis go hand-in-hand with hyperconnectivity: once we’re all connected together in a few dozen or few hundred million ways, we need someplace to pool our common wealth of resources, information, knowledge, and experience. Wikipedia is proof positive that everyone, everywhere, is expert in something, even something terrifically obscure – and it’s proof that someone else, somewhere else, will treasure that expertise.

When the administrators saw the PBwiki that Stephen set up, they were amazed and delighted. All of the hard yards of coordinating via emails could now be handled through a collaborative process, with a common tool accessible anywhere Internet connectivity could be had. “So now,” said the Head of School, “can we bring the staff up to speed on this? And the teachers? Can we get them to start planning their courses on this? And get the parents more involved? And what about the kids – can they use this too?”

With just one simple act – and really, an act that saved him work – Stephen introduced a new way of thinking and working to Canberra’s largest private primary school. It’s early days yet, but as they come to learn to use the wiki, discovering its strengths and weaknesses, it will begin to transform the way they teach. It is opening the way to a broader and more comprehensive revolution in education. This “accidental revolution” is a clear sign that the ground is fertile. Things are breaking through all over. All it takes is one person, in the right place, at the right time, with the right idea.

Which brings me back to all of you, here in this room, this morning. We are the change agents. All of us. We don’t have to leave here today with grand plans. Far from it. All we need to do is share with one another what we’ve learned along the way: what’s worked, what hasn’t, and why. We need to connect with one another – using all the tools at our disposal (and there’s a lot of them), and we need to put the new tools of knowledge sharing to work for us, pooling our own deep reservoirs of expertise, learning from each other as effectively as we can. If each of us can add one good idea – and I reckon each of us has at least one good idea – that means there are a lot of good ideas in this room. Just one of those can change the educational environment of a school. Stephen Collins’ story is proof of that.

For the rest of the day, I’m going to sit back and listen. Hard. I’m going to listen to all of the good ideas you folks have been working up as we all confront this huge challenge. When I hear an idea that strikes me, I’ll be blogging it – on Twitter. At the end of these four events, I’ll be able to go back and read my tweetstream, and see what really interested me. Perhaps it will interest you too. All the while, 660 other folks, all around the world, will be looking in. Some of them might get a good idea, something they want to share with us. We can and must use hyperconnectivity to increase our effectiveness. We can and must use knowledge sharing to increase our intelligence. We can crack this problem.

After all, we’ve been around the block. These wacky kids, they’re just getting started. They have the tools, but lack the wisdom to use them effectively. It’s up to us to teach them how. But first, we’ve got learn how to use them. That done, we can transform education, and transform their enormous capacity to learn. But, right now, the teachers must become students.

I’m waiting, with my pencil raised.

Here’s a link to the big version.

– E.M. Forster, Howards End

I. Welcome to the Social

At 2:30 PM, Monday 12 May 2008, a huge earthquake struck the Sichuan province of China. In some places, the ground trembled for as long as three minutes. When the shaking stopped, those with computers turned to them to find out what had happened, and to share their own experiences. Just last month China passed the United States as the nation with the largest Internet-connected population: over 221 million Chinese go online nearly every day.

We all do the same sorts of things online: the utilitarian tasks, like electronic banking and flight reservations; the work-related tasks, answering queries from colleagues; and all of us, everywhere, use the Internet to expand and deepen our social lives.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Internet, we are told, will eventually turn the planet into the equivalent of the nerdy uni drop-out, living a hermit’s life in some poor parent’s basement. We’re turning within, abandoning contact with the cruel world.

In reality, something very different is taking place. We are reaching out, through the wire, first to our families, then our friends, our colleagues, and – just now – we’re touching people we’ve never met. And likely will never meet.

We touch all these individuals with acts of communication. To our families, we send love and kisses. To our friends, a favorite joke. To colleagues, a relevant link to an online report. And, for everyone else – well, we’ll come to that.

Every time we reach out, we reinforce and strengthen the bonds that tie us to other people. And this isn’t a new thing, or even something that’s unique to humans: gorillas and chimpanzees do it. This reaching out, to share something – something that we know, or something we stumbled upon, or something we feel – is a basic part of every one of us. Sharing makes the world go round.

Suddenly we’ve gotten very, very good at it.

Just in the last four years – less time than I’ve been in Australia – we’ve seen the phenomenal rise of the technologies of sharing. Flickr – which allows you to post your photos in one spot, where everyone else can view them. YouTube – now the third most trafficked site on the Web. And now there’s Twitter – which allows you to share bite-sited bits of text – called ‘tweets’ – with a select group of “followers”.

I call Twitter a “Social Messaging Service” – yes, another SMS – because it allows me to communicate much the same sorts things I would with a text message – but, rather than going to just one other person, I can send that message to over 530 of my followers. Many of these people are known to me – in person, or by reputation – but some follow me simply because they’re interested in what I have to say. Though most of the chatter on Twitter is inane – like the world’s weirdest cocktail party – some of it is incredibly immediate, vital and important.

As, for example, last Monday. Just before I left the house for the evening, I received a few tweets talking about the earthquake in China. What earthquake? I wondered – there’d been nothing about it on the telly, or on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, or the New York Times, or BBC News. Even the Associate Press hadn’t burped up an initial report. But I have one follower (whom I follow in return), Dedric Lam, who lives just outside Shanghai. Everyone in Shanghai felt the shaking, and, as they connected with one another, they all knew that everyone else in Shanghai had felt it, too. As they received tweets from places further away, they knew the shaking had been felt in Beijing – and quickly realized that Sichuan had gone dark. No tweets, no websites, no phone service. All of this flew by on Twitter a full thirty minutes before the first reports made their way onto the wire. When I met up with friends that night, I asked them if they had any news about the earthquake in China. They said, “What earthquake?”

Twitter, connecting people across boundaries of politics, culture and language through its social messaging service, has – quite accidentally – become a human early-warning system. One tweet might not have the ring of truth, unless it comes from a particularly well-trusted source. A thousand tweets, all saying more-or-less the same thing, possess enormous authenticity.

By the time I got back to my flat on Monday evening, the Twittersphere was alive with tweets from people in China, passing along the latest news reports, video segments and photos from the front lines of the rescue effort. On Tuesday, Dedric Lam posted perhaps a hundred tweets, the best of which I “re-tweeted”, forwarding them along to my own followers. This “human network” of connections gave all of us more insight into the tragedy unfolding in Sichuan than anything available from any news broadcaster or publisher. The mainstream news sources, playing catch-up, tried to send reporters into an area where no cars or planes or trains could travel, while, from deep within the earthquake zone, messages made their way out into the Human Network, via text messages, or email, or Twitter, and, forwarded along through this dense maze of connections, reached everyone interested in learning the ‘ground truth’ of the disaster. Some of the stories were uplifting – people saved from beneath collapsed concrete and brick buildings. Others tore at your heart.

We now have so many ways to stay connected, we’ve crossed the boundary from “well-connected” into “hyperconnected”. Our ability to reach out and touch or be touched by someone else, over matters trivial or life-and-death has grown so suddenly and so comprehensively, it’s changing the way we think, and the way we work. The social message service isn’t just a fun way to while the way the time, or a great new way to stay informed: it’s the way we’ll do business in the 21st century.

II. Instant Karma

On the first weekend of April, TechCrunch founder and widely-read blogger Michael Arrington faced frustrations at home. His broadband, provided by US cable giant Comcast, had gone dark. Despite every attempt to get his service restored – including a number of calls to Comcast’s repair center (receiving a different explanation for the outage every time he called), he spent the weekend stealing bandwidth from his neighbors’ WiFi connections. After thirty hours of putting up with crap from Comcast, Arrington let loose – on Twitter. Arrington has over 17,000 followers on Twitter, people who enjoy reading his insightful commentary on all things digital, individuals who are themselves well-connected and influential. So as Arrington vented his spleen, a large section of the technology community – all around the world – listened.

To Arrington’s immense surprise, within 20 minutes of his first tweet about Comcast, he received a call from a Comcast executive in Philadelphia – calling from the other side of the country, in the middle of a weekend. The executive offered his help getting Arrington’s service restored, and mentioned that he spent a lot of time monitoring Twitter and other social media services – trying to get a sense of what Comcast’s customers were saying online about their broadband service. The executive saw the discussion break out around Arrington’s tweets, and decided to swoop in and take action.

Although famous in technology circles, Arrington isn’t alone in getting such star treatment. Josh Lowenson, a self-professed “internet nobody”, was having some trouble installing software that had come with his Comcast cable modem, and fired off a few angry tweets about it. Within a few minutes, a Comcast employee tweeted back with a solution to his problems. Everyone was happy, and Lowenson wrote a blog post praising Comcast’s responsiveness to his needs. That kind of public display of affection is gold for any company working directly in the consumer marketplace.

A weapon with that kind of potency can be pointed both ways. Two weeks ago, a good friend of mine, a consultant who works with a range of companies, gave a presentation to the managing director of an up-and-coming web media firm. The presentation had been organized by the MD’s staff, who hired my friend to bring this out-of-touch MD up-to-speed. Now, we all know that consultants frequently get hired to deliver messages up the chain of command that the staff would present themselves, if they had the cojones. You can hire a consultant (and hide behind them) to break bad news or just difficult news with a degree of safety. We also know that some folks like to shoot the messenger.

That’s just what happened to my unlucky friend. After a successful presentation, he found himself peppered with insults and accusations from the MD – treatment that he reckoned he hadn’t earned. So, as soon as he left the meeting, he sent a tweet from his mobile – Twitter accepts text messages. I got the tweet and followed up on it, getting the whole horrid story.

That’s when I had a real penny-drop moment: although my friend has only a few Twitter followers, two of those followers, myself and Raven Zachary, have many hundreds. Both of us are well-known individuals, well-trusted in technology circles. If we spread the word about the nasty behavior of this particular MD, through our own hyperconnections, we could effectively bring that company to its knees. They’d be unable to hire any qualified technology types, because – for anyone who cared to look – the facts would be out there, the story plain for all to see. We could trigger the ‘nuclear option’, if we wanted to. And this stupid and mean MD would pay the price – in full – for her stupidity. It would all be over in just a few minutes.

Call it instant karma.

All of this means that we need new tools, more tools, better tools that can read the collective mind of the Internet, and – through whatever data sifting magic you care to use – present it as a comprehensible stream of meaningful tidbits. Everyone needs this, but big commercial firms need it desperately, because customers can now organize themselves against those firms at the press of a button. Rumors can destroy markets in an afternoon. And bad behavior can no longer be covered up.

But this is more than just a warning call; this is an opportunity. The same techniques of social sharing that we’re using in our day-to-day lives are almost never used inside companies. You got mail, and – if you’re very lucky – instant messaging. But the idea of giving employees a central line, where they can collectively gripe or muse or collaborate? That’s beyond the pale. Too much freedom, too much time spent doing “unproductive” tasks. Too much capability to foment an internal rebellion to corporate stupidity.

As if sharing your mind and building esprit de corps were unproductive.

There’s a disconnect between the way we do business and the way we live our lives. Right now, our lives outside the corporate cubicle are changing so rapidly it’s making us a bit dizzy. Down on the cube farm, things are pretty much same as it ever was. The longer this goes on, the more dangerous it becomes: for these companies, for their customers, for your job security. But, if you can build the tools that allow this sharing, if you can give everyone in your organization access to the collective capabilities of your organization, you can turbo-charge it. You can grasp the nettle, and turn all these potential negatives into game-changing positives.

Let’s look at how.

III. Empower Me

The Web is more than just words on a page, or a funny video embedded in a blog. The Web isn’t about content. Even though we constantly hear that ‘content is king’, it just ain’t so. Connection is king. Twelve years ago, sharing meant a cute page with an animated GIF background and bad MIDI music, accompanying four thousand digital snaps of your kitty cat. While that still goes on today, it’s become a sideshow. It’s not the main event. Sharing has evolved into something new, something more than just a way to unburden yourself.

In January 2001, when Jimmy Wales opened his failed encyclopedia project to all contributors, he had no idea that for the next two years, thousands of individuals would labor ceaselessly, adding article entries on every topic they could think of, correcting the grammatical and spelling mistakes in each other’s articles, and borrowing from the 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica where they lacked the expert knowledge themselves. When I first saw Wikipedia, in January 2002, it held nearly fifteen thousand articles on a broad range of subjects. Not bad, but hardly encyclopedic, though respectable enough after a year of thankless work on the part of many, many “Wikipedians”.

Even that was enough; word spread about Wikipedia. People dropped by to use it, adding something they knew, amending something they knew to be incorrect, and, each time, leaving something of themselves behind. With each contribution they made, they grew more fond of Wikipedia, returning to it more and more frequently, all the while telling their friends. This virtuous cycle – where contributions produce affection, and affection produces even more contributions – led to the exponential growth of Wikipedia, which, as of 19 May 2008, has two million three hundred and seventy six thousand articles in English. In just half a decade, Wikipedia has become the definitive reference in the English language, displacing the two hundred and fifty year-old Encyclopedia Britannica, which has just one-ninth the number articles.

Wikipedia is not perfect, but then, neither is Britannica. Both of them are, on average, equally accurate. But Wikipedia, available anywhere, at any time, through any connection to the Internet, has a reach and influence Britannica could never hope to achieve. As a child, I read through a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia, cover to cover, all twenty volumes digested over a year’s time; a child today could never hope to read all the articles in Wikipedia: new ones are created in such numbers that they’d always be falling behind.

In Wikipedia we have the standard factual reference in the English language. What has this given us? It all depends on how you use it. A secondary school student might use Wikipedia – against teacher’s strict instructions – to write a paper. Or we might settle a trivia dispute that arises at a dinner party.

If we were smart, we’d use the factual information in Wikipedia to make better decisions. In truth, we have such a wealth of knowledge available to us in Wikipedia that we should think of it as a part of our brains that sits just outside our heads. If we used it – consistently – as a reference, we’d make fewer mistakes, because, as the old saw (from Mark Twain) goes, “It’s not what you don’t know – it’s what you know that ain’t so!” For all of the factual questions of our lives, we have now have the answers. We just need to put those answers to work.

If we leverage the wealth of knowledge and expertise that once sat securely locked away in our heads, knowledge which we are now able to share with one another, we can increase our own intelligence. We can consistently make better decisions. We can improve our effectiveness, both as individuals and in groups.

This basic innovation – the most significant of the 21st century – has enormous implications for organizations of all sorts. Organizations thrive on information and knowledge. Every trade, from the most physical to the most abstract, relies upon the expertise of those who practice it. We apprentice young people so that this knowledge is passed along, or we send them to uni and post-graduate studies. We can accelerate and improve this transmission of knowledge with the technologies of sharing. Sometimes text is the best medium for sharing knowledge, but video or audio or animations or photographs often work far more effectively. You can go to Wikipedia to learn about the history of baking, but you have to go to YouTube if you want to learn how to bake a cake.

Consider the lesson of Wikipedia, and think about how it can apply to your own organization: can you improve the effectiveness of your organization’s ability to make decisions, to react quickly to a changing market, to innovate, to constantly re-invent itself? These are the challenges facing all organizations in the 21st century, in both the commercial and public sectors of the economy.

We now have proven tools that allow us to improve our effectiveness – to “hyperempower” the organization. First, you need to develop the tools which provide “hyperconnectivity” within these organizations. Once you’ve got that hyperconnectivity, you need to provide systems which allow these individuals to share their expertise and multiply their effectiveness.

It could be as simple as Twitter plus a Wiki. Just those two pieces, thrown together, can create a revolution in any organization. But, when you start adding rich media – capturing everything which can’t easily be expressed in text – you begin building up a reservoir of expertise which provides a foundation for excellence, a launchpad for a rocketship ride into hyperempowerment.

So today, as you learn about all the nifty things you can do, consider this: you already know how to put these tools to work. You use these tools every single day. They haven’t yet transformed the organization. But they will. Right now almost anything is possible. We’re at the cusp of an explosion in innovation, as we put the technologies of sharing to work. You have the tools, and your organizations need this to happen if they expect to be in business in a few years’ time. It’s up to you – all of you, here in this room today – to go down to the code mines, and make this revolution happen. You can lead the way. You can empower me. You can empower all of us.

On the 18th of October in 2004, a UK cable channel, SkyOne, broadcast the premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica, writer-producer Ron Moore’s inspired revisioning of the decidedly campy 70s television series. SkyOne broadcast the episode as soon as it came off the production line, but its US production partner, the SciFi Channel, decided to hold off until January – a slow month for television – before airing the episodes. The audience for Battlestar Galactica, young and technically adept, made digital recordings of the broadcasts as they went to air, cut out the commercials breaks, then posted them to the Internet.

For an hour-long television programme, a lot of data needs to be dragged across the Internet, enough to clog up even the fastest connection. But these young science fiction fans used a new tool, BitTorrent, to speed the bits on their way. BitTorrent allows a large number of computers (in this case, over 10,000 computers were involved) to share the heavy lifting. Each of the computers downloaded pieces of Battlestar Galactica, and as each got a piece, they offered it up to any other computer which wanted a copy of that piece. Like a forest of hands each trading puzzle pieces, each computer quickly assembled a complete copy of the show.

All of this happened within a few hours of Battlestar Galactica going to air. That same evening, on the other side of the Atlantic, American fans watched the very same episode that their fellow fans in the UK had just viewed. They liked what they saw, and told their friends, who also downloaded the episode, using BitTorrent. Within just a few days, perhaps a hundred thousand Americans had watched the show.

US cable networks regularly count their audience in hundreds of thousands. A million would be considered incredibly good. Executives for SciFi Channel ran the numbers and assumed that the audience for this new and very expensive TV series had been seriously undercut by this international trafficking in television. They couldn’t have been more wrong. When Battlestar Galactica finally aired, it garnered the biggest audiences SciFi Channel had ever seen – well over 3 million viewers.

How did this happen? Word of mouth. The people who had the chops to download Battlestar Galactica liked what they saw, and told their friends, most of whom were content to wait for SciFi Channel to broadcast the series. The boost given the series by its core constituency of fans helped it over the threshold from cult classic into a genuine cultural phenomenon. Battlestar Galactica has become one of the most widely-viewed cable TV series in history; critics regularly lavish praise on it, and yes, fans still download it, all over the world.

Although it might seem counterintuitive, the widespread “piracy” of Battlestar Galactica was instrumental to its ratings success. This isn’t the only example. BBC’s Dr. Who, leaked to BitTorrent by a (quickly fired) Canadian editor, drummed up another huge audience. It seems, in fact, that “piracy” is good. Why? We live in an age of fantastic media oversupply: there are always too many choices of things to watch, or listen to, or play with. But, if one of our friends recommends something, something they loved enough to spend the time and effort downloading, that carries a lot of weight.

All of this sharing of media means that the media titans – the corporations which produce and broadcast most of the television we watch – have lost control over their own content. Anything broadcast anywhere, even just once, becomes available everywhere, almost instantaneously. While that’s a revolutionary development, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg. The audience now has the ability to share anything they like – whether produced by a media behemoth, or made by themselves. YouTube has allowed individuals (some talented, some less so) reach audiences numbering in hundreds of millions. The attention of the audience, increasingly focused on what the audience makes for itself, has been draining ratings away from broadcasters, a drain which accelerates every time someone posts something funny, or poignant, or instructive to YouTube.

The mass media hasn’t collapsed, but it has been hollowed out. The audience occasionally tunes in – especially to watch something newsworthy, in real-time – but they’ve moved on. It’s all about what we’re saying directly to one another. The individual – every individual – has become a broadcaster in his or her own right. The mechanics of this person-to-person sharing, and the architecture of these “New Networks”, are driven by the oldest instincts of humankind.

The New Networks

Human beings are social animals. Long before we became human – or even recognizably close – we became social. For at least 11 million years, before our ancestors broke off from the gorillas and chimpanzees, we cultivated social characteristics. In social groups, these distant forbears could share the tasks of survival: finding food, raising young, and self-defense. Human babies, in particular, take many years to mature, requiring constantly attentive parenting – time stolen away from other vital activities. Living in social groups helped ensure that these defenseless members of the group grew to adulthood. The adults who best expressed social qualities bore more and healthier children. The day-to-day pressures of survival on the African savannahs drove us to be ever more adept with our social skills.

We learned to communicate with gestures, then (no one knows just how long ago) we learned to speak. Each step forward in communication reinforced our social relationships; each moment of conversation reaffirms our commitment to one another, every spoken word an unspoken promise to support, defend and extend the group. As we communicate, whether in gestures or in words, we build models of one another’s behavior. (This is why we can judge a friend’s reaction to some bit of news, or a joke, long before it comes out of our mouths.) We have always walked around with our heads full of other people, a tidy little “social network,” the first and original human network. We can hold about 150 other people in our heads (chimpanzees can manage about 30, gorillas about 15, but we’ve got extra brains they don’t to help us with that), so, for 90% of human history, we lived in tribes of no more than about 150 individuals, each of us in constant contact, a consistent communication building and reinforcing bonds which would make us the most successful animals on Earth. We learned from one another, and shared whatever we learned; a continuity of knowledge passed down seamlessly, generation upon generation, a chain of transmission that still survives within the world’s indigenous communities. Social networks are the gentle strings which connect us to our origins.

This is the old network. But it’s also the new network. A few years ago, researcher Mizuko Ito studied teenagers in Japan, to find that these kids – all of whom owned mobile telephones – sent as many as a few hundred text messages, every single day, to the same small circle of friends. These messages could be intensely meaningful (the trials and tribulations of adolescent relationships), or just pure silliness; the content mattered much less than that constant reminder and reinforcement of the relationship. This “co-presence,” as she named it, represents the modern version of an incredibly ancient human behavior, a behavior that had been unshackled by technology, to span vast distances. These teens could send a message next door, or halfway across the country. Distance mattered not: the connection was all.

In 2001, when Ito published her work, many dismissed her findings as a by-product of those “wacky Japanese” and their technophile lust for new toys. But now, teenagers everywhere in the developed world do the same thing, sending tens to hundreds of text messages a day. When they run out of money to send texts (which they do, unless they have very wealthy parents), they simply move online, using instant messaging and MySpace and other techniques to continue the never-ending conversation.

We adults do it too, though we don’t recognize it. Most of us who live some of our lives online, receive a daily dose of email: we flush the spam, answer the requests and queries of our co-workers, deal with any family complaints. What’s left over, from our friends, more and more consists of nothing other than a link to something – a video, a website, a joke – somewhere on the Internet. This new behavior, actually as old as we are, dates from the time when sharing information ensured our survival. Each time we find something that piques our interest, we immediately think, “hmm, I bet so-and-so would really like this.” That’s the social network in our heads, grinding away, filtering our experience against our sense of our friends’ interests. We then hit the “forward” button, sending the tidbit along, reinforcing that relationship, reminding them that we’re still here – and still care. These “Three Fs” – find, filter and forward – have become the cornerstone of our new networks, information flowing freely from person-to-person, in weird and unpredictable ways, unbounded by geography or simultaneity (a friend can read an email weeks after you send it), but always according to long-established human behaviors.

One thing is different about the new networks: we are no longer bounded by the number of individuals we can hold in our heads. Although we’ll never know more than 150 people well enough for them to take up some space between our ears (unless we grow huge, Spock-like minds) our new tools allow us to reach out and connect with casual acquaintances, or even people we don’t know. Our connectivity has grown into “hyperconnectivity”, and a single individual, with the right message, at the right time, can reach millions, almost instantaneously.

This simple, sudden, subtle change in culture has changed everything.

The Nuclear Option

On the 12th of May in 2008, a severe earthquake shook a vast area of southeast Asia, centered in the Chinese state of Sichuan. Once the shaking stopped – in some places, it lasted as long as three minutes – people got up (when they could, as may lay under collapsed buildings), dusted themselves off, and surveyed the damage. Those who still had power turned to their computers to find out what had happened, and share what had happened to them. Some of these people used so-called “social messaging services”, which allowed them to share a short message – similar to a text message – with hundreds or thousands of acquaintances in their hyperconnected social networks.

Within a few minutes, people on every corner of the planet knew about the earthquake – well in advance of any reports from Associated Press, the BBC, or CNN. This network of individuals, sharing information each other through their densely hyperconnected networks, spread the news faster, more effectively, and more comprehensively than any global broadcaster.

This had happened before. On 7 July 2005, the first pictures of the wreckage caused by bombs detonated within London’s subway system found their way onto Flickr, an Internet photo-sharing service, long before being broadcast by BBC. A survivor, waking past one of the destroyed subway cars, took snaps from her mobile and sent them directly on to Flickr, where everyone on the planet could have a peek. One person can reach everyone else, if what they have to say (or show) merits such attention, because that message, even if seen by only one other person, will be forwarded on and on, through our hyperconnected networks, until it has been received by everyone for whom that message has salience. Just a few years ago, it might have taken hours (or even days) for a message to traverse the Human Network. Now it happens a few seconds.

Most messages don’t have a global reach, nor do they need one. It is enough that messages reach interested parties, transmitted via the Human Network, because just that alone has rewritten the rules of culture. An intemperate CEO screams at a consultant, who shares the story through his network: suddenly, no one wants to work for the CEO’s firm. A well-connected blogger gripes about problems with his cable TV provider, a story forwarded along until – just a half-hour later – he receives a call from a vice-president of that company, contrite with apologies and promises of an immediate repair. An American college student, arrested in Egypt for snapping some photos in the wrong place at the wrong time, text messages a single word – “ARRESTED” – to his social network, and 24 hours later, finds himself free, escorted from jail by a lawyer and the American consul, because his network forwarded this news along to those who could do something about his imprisonment.

Each of us, thoroughly hyperconnected, brings the eyes and ears of all of humanity with us, wherever we go. Nothing is hidden anymore, no secret safe. We each possess a ‘nuclear option’ – the capability to go wide, instantaneously, bringing the hyperconnected attention of the Human Network to a single point. This dramatically empowers each of us, a situation we are not at all prepared for. A single text message, forwarded perhaps a million times, organized the population of Xiamen, a coastal city in southern China, against a proposed chemical plant – despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to sensor the message as it passed through the state-run mobile telephone network. Another message, forwarded around a community of white supremacists in Sydney’s southern suburbs, led directly to the Cronulla Riots, two days of rampage and attacks against Sydney’s Lebanese community, in December 2005.

When we watch or read stories about the technologies of sharing, they almost always center on recording companies and film studios crying poverty, of billions of dollars lost to ‘piracy’. That’s a sideshow, a distraction. The media companies have been hurt by the Human Network, but that’s only a minor a side-effect of the huge cultural transformation underway. As we plug into the Human Network, and begin to share that which is important to us with others who will deem it significant, as we learn to “find the others”, reinforcing the bonds to those others every time we forward something to them, we dissolve the monolithic ties of mass media and mass culture. Broadcasters, who spoke to millions, are replaced by the Human Network: each of us, networks in our own right, conversing with a few hundred well-chosen others. The cultural consensus, driven by the mass media, which bound 20th-century nations together in a collective vision, collapses into a Babel-like configuration of social networks which know no cultural or political boundaries.

The bomb has already dropped. The nuclear option has been exercised. The Human Network brought us together, and broke us apart. But in these fragments and shards of culture we find an immense vitality, the protean shape of the civilization rising to replace the world we have always known. It all hinges on the transition from sharing to knowing.

In 1997, as India began its sweeping ascent into industrialization, the newly-deregulated telecommunications industry blanketed the country with mobile transceiver towers. Some of these towers, strung along the Kerala shoreline, could project their signals up to 25 km out to sea, well within the range of the fishermen on their sturdy dhows.

Although mobile telephony isn’t expensive in India, relative to incomes, it’s extremely dear. A typical cheap mobile telephone – such as the Nokia 1100, the most popular consumer electronics device in history – costs the equivalent of several thousand dollars. One wealthy fisherman did purchase a mobile telephone, and brought it with him to sea. At some point, he communicated with the mainland: perhaps a family call. During the call, he learned of a market desperately in need of fish. He set his sails for that port, and made a tidy profit. The next day, he made a few calls into shore, and again learned where he might sell his catch for the highest price. A seeing man in the kingdom of the blind, this fisherman very quickly earned far more money than any of his competitors.

More than any other species, human beings copy the behaviors of our peers; a recent scientific study showed that young chimpanzees scored better than toddlers on cognitive tasks, but that toddlers proved far more adept at ‘aping’ the behavior of others. We are wired to observe, learn from and copy the behavior of others. The Kerala fisherman noted the success of this ‘king fisher,’ and, despite the staggering cost – equivalent to a month’s income – purchased their own mobiles. Within a few months, all of Kerala’s fishermen used mobiles to coordinate their sales into the Kerala fishmarkets. Each market had just the right amount of fish, selling at just the right price, to guarantee each fisherman a tidy profit. A thousand year-old problem had been solved – and the fishermen now earn so much more money that those very expensive mobile telephones recoup their costs in just two months!

A decade ago, half the world had never made a telephone call. Today, over half the world owns a mobile telephone. Study after study indicate that the vast swath of the world’s medium poor (those who earn anything from a few dollars to a few tens of dollars a day) dramatically improve their earning potential with a mobile telephone. Microfinance organizations, such as Grameen Bank, founded by Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunnis, have established their own telecommunications companies, geared to serve the needs of the poor, knowing that connectivity is one of the keys to solving the perpetual problem of poverty. Meanwhile, across Africa and Asia, billions who had been left behind in drive to globalization, purchase a mobile knowing it to be their passport to economic advancement.

Why is connectivity so important to success? You may as well ask if a deaf-mute could participate in an auction. We need to be able to communicate to participate in The Human Network; as we better our ability to communicate, we reap the benefits of a deeper participation. All of this is old, old knowledge, buried deep within our cultures, our bodies and our brains, and it has suddenly accelerated and amplified, wiring us into The Human Network, connecting us directly to the rest of humanity.

We can alert the entire planet with a text message, create a market with just a word, scour the best minds on Earth in search of answers to our questions. All of this, unexpected by economists, sociologists or technologists, is now available to the majority of humanity, and – within just a few years – will have encompassed all but the billion most desperately poor individuals. As we pile onto The Human Network, exploring our newfound ability to communicate across every barrier nature and culture have placed in our path, we consistently increase our effectiveness, watching and copying our peers – just as the Kerala fishermen did.

We can chart our path to into this startling future by taking a good look at the present. Many of the forces shaping and benefits delivered by The Human Network have already appeared; some in embryonic form, some now fully grown. We can communicate, and share with one another; we can pool our shared knowledge resources to increase our intelligence, improving our ability to make good decisions; once smarter, we can band together – across nations, across cultures, across the world – to achieve our economic, social and political goals. All of this is already happening, and all of it will change everything in the human world.

I have always loved to write. As far back as I possessed the capability to scribble a coherent narrative onto a piece of paper, I’ve written stories. I remember writing a short story in third or fourth grade, about astronauts on the first voyage to Mars. Many words about the launch, a few words about the journey, then a quick, mysterious conclusion once they landed. It all ended rather badly, I recall, with just a last call for help coming across the twenty-minute delayed airwaves, before all went silent.

In my senior year of high school, when I took “advanced placement” English, I had a teacher who was both English and the mother of one of my good friends. In a small class – only about ten of us – unmercifully drilling the rules and structure of the essay into us, she points off for every misspelled word. As I have always spelled atrociously, I had to make up for it by scoring very highly on composition skills. (Thankfully, computers do our spelling for us now, which shows you the banality of the task – better automated than done by a person.) I learned to avoid the passive voice, learned to litter my texts with commas - to better approximate the cadence of the “inner voice”, and wrote a thirty-page research paper on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, which, I now realize, I understood not at all.

At MIT, I had the good fortune to have Frank Conroy as my lecturer in a short story writing workshop. MIT, hardly known as a bastion of the humanities – except insofar as economics, the dismal science, falls under that umbrella – did have the money and the reputation to attract some of the very best writers and thinkers in the United States. William Irwin Thompson, whom I regard as one of the fundamental influences in my thinking, taught at MIT in the 1960s, if only so he could spend the next thirty years writing piercing critiques of managerial civilization. Frank Conroy, by the time I’d met him, had already received broad critical acclaim for his novel-memoire Stop-Time, which received a nomination for the National Book Award. A classic archetype of the humanities professor, with tweed jacket and pullover sweater and an unruly shock of graying hair and nicotine stains on his teeth, Conroy loved writing, and passed that love along to his students. At MIT, where most writing took place in LISP or FORTRAN, not English, that represented a Sisyphean task. Students enrolled in humanities courses not for any love of Proust or Picasso or Prokofiev, but because they had graduation requirements to fulfill. Resented as interruptions in the “real” work of mastering nature, the humanities continue thrive at MIT despite persistent institutional neglect. None of this seemed to bother Conroy; he took the shy freshmen who attended his lectures and drew them out, encouraging them to explore the world inside their heads on the written page.

That year, I won the Freshman Fiction Award at MIT – my only moment of academic distinction during my curtailed tenure there. Frank Conroy deserves the credit for that. He taught me to avoid the passive voice: “Look to Orwell. Read Nineteen Eighty-Four. You can go pages before you read a single sentence in the passive voice.” He taught me that the true stories, the best stories, come from experience. Write what you know, as clearly and capably as you can. Show, don’t tell; let the story expose itself.

I failed academically at MIT, missing many, many lectures – too depressed, some days, to get out of bed until after sunset. Nonetheless, at the end of term, writing prize in hand, I visited Conroy in his office, to thank him. He seemed genuinely surprised and touched. “I’m just sorry we didn’t have more time together,” he remarked, gently upbraiding me for my ever-more-frequent absences. “I’m leaving at the end of term.” Conroy had just received an appointment to head the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, a perch from which he would nurture an entire generation of American writers. That was the last time I ever saw him.

That last sentence, in the passive voice, marks the first you’ve read so far. Frank Conroy taught me well.

II.

Fourteen years later, following the invention of VRML, I received an offer from a technical publishing company, New Riders Publishing, to write the very first book on VRML. I’d never thought I’d have the opportunity to write a book on any subject; in the years since dropping out of MIT, I’d become a professional software engineer. With only a few small exceptions, all of my writing took place in assembly language or ‘C’. I poured my intellect into code, banging bits, breathing life into programs. But a book about a subject near and dear to me, a subject that I (arguably) knew better than any other person, that seemed tailor-made. I accepted, without really knowing what would happen next.

I procrastinated. And procrastinated. Something about facing not just a single sheet of blank paper, but two hundred of them, freaked me out. My publisher, growing worried, finally sent me an email which simply read:

Your house is burning down.

Meaning, I suppose, that unless I delivered a manuscript, more or less immediately, that’d be an end to it. No book, no deal, no nothing. I flew to my father’s house, just outside of Boston, sat down at my laptop, and cranked out the manuscript – all 350 pages – in just 31 days.

I know that’s considered extraordinarily fast, but I’ve always written quickly. Words either come or they do not, and I can gauge my own engagement with the subject by how quickly they come. (For example, I’ve written the last thousand-or-so words in an hour’s time. That’s just about my usual rate when I’m writing.) Writing can not be forced. If it takes days to write a single paragraph, I’ve learned to recognize that I’m simply not yet ready to write. Though never fickle, my muse won’t be hurried. But, when I’m ready to write, it becomes almost impossible to avoid. The words create a strange pressure within me, wanting to pound their way out of my head and onto the page. Over the years, that pressure has driven me to produce several thousand pages of written works: books, scholarly articles, opinions and commentaries, and many, many essays.

The essay is my preferred form. It feels appropriate and very natural. From the French for “to attempt” (essayer), an essay allows the author to mix the personal and subjective with the actual and authoritative. Joan Didion – perhaps the greatest American essayist of the 20th century (and, so far, the greatest of the 21st) – combined her own neurotic and apocalyptic visions of a culture in collapse with the observational techniques of a city desk reporter to produce Slouching Towards Bethlehem, perhaps the definitive assessment of the 60’s counterculture in San Francisco. William Irwin Thompson combined his own neurotic and apocalyptic visions of a culture in collapse with the observational techniques of a ethnographer to produce Getting Back to Things at MIT, arguably the definitive humanistic critique of late Industrial Era civilization. (As a student at MIT, I received a reprint of that essay no fewer than three times – on the first day of three different humanities classes.) Hunter S. Thompson, though normally thought of as a journalist, wrote as an essayist: personal, poignant, and angry. And neurotic and apocalyptic.

Neurosis, we’ve learned, consists of a state of anxious awareness. Neurotics, intensely aware of the world around them, fear it may suddenly strike against them. Apparently, this has survival value: in times of chaos, the neurotic is the seeing man in the kingdom of the blind, and lives long enough to pass his neurotic genes along to another neurotic generation. Neurotics are nearly always apocalyptic in their thinking; the interior landscape of imminent doom, amplified across the perceptions of the psyche, become the visions of St. John of Patmos, a current of literature that flows on down through the ages to the Quetzalcoatl prophesies of Daniel Pinchbeck.

I am a neurotic, and my penchant toward the apocalyptic, well documented on YouTube and through various other media freely downloadable on the Internet, leaves little to the imagination. That I have gone quiet about various apocalyptic scenarios (for instance, I have said nothing about “2012” since a talk given at Burning Man in 2006) does not mean that I no longer entertain them. I read my various blogs, each of which, in its own particular way, echoes my apocalyptic turn of mind. I can fantasy an oil crash, or an economic crash, a crash of civilizational over-complexity (as New Scientist did, just a few weeks ago), or dream of a sudden, machinic singularity. I can scare myself, grinning into the funhouse mirrors of my neurotic mind, and, in so doing, come back with some ideas, which, when clothed in the appropriate language, seem not so much scary as entertaining and enlightening. Neurosis as creative strength.

But it does not do to scare the horses. Although my fellow neurotics want to hear the rising winds of chaos battering at the flimsy walls of human culture, I do not want to be a prophet. Instead, reason prevails throughout my work. Although The Playful World closes on what could be read as an fairly apocalyptic note, a world where the tide of history reverses, and parents learn the new language of the world from their children (a vision which, I will note here, appears to be coming to pass), those last few pages present a vista broad enough to allow a multitude of different readings. I do not intend to scare, and if you feel your heart beating faster as you close the pages of that book, that tells you more about you than about me. I simply painted as honest picture as I knew how.

My next book – the current book – will definitively end on an apocalyptic note. I wrestled with this, for many months, until I accepted that if I tell the story in any other way, it will not feel true. The transformations in human behavior, cultural organization, and our sudden rise into hyperempowerment mean that things will be growing increasingly chaotic for some years to come. This does not necessarily mean we will be doomed to an endless “War of all against all,” as prophesied by Hobbes. Forces will rise to oppose the forces of chaos; this may well result in even more chaos, but I consider it equally likely that the dynamic opposition of well-matched hyperempowered polities will result in a new form of social stability – one which looks nothing like anything we’re familiar with today. Either way, that is apocalypse, because, whichever outcome, everything utterly changes.

I have been working toward the expression of this idea for quite some time. Looking back on Becoming Transhuman, a feature-length film/performance piece I created for MINDSTATES 2001, I can see some the themes of The Human Network in their embryonic form. This idea has been with me a while, but only now have I learned the language necessary to express it in terms comprehensible to a broad audience of people who do not share my own neurotic tendencies. The film is not the book, but points directly toward the book. The times have caught up with my own apocalyptic visions. And I have found the words which will allow me to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre – without starting a riot.

III.

The Human Network opens with a basic assertion: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. I can demonstrate the truth of this statement, and will do so repeatedly throughout the first several chapters. I know full well that Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross and countless other writers have put the full texts of their work online, and that this has not cannibalized their sales, but increased them. I bought Stross’ Accelerando after I downloaded the entire text, read the first chapter on my computer, and realized I needed to have a printed copy of my own. I know this works. But can I convince any potential publisher to release The Human Network freely online at publication?

Publishing, hardly the most cutting-edge of industries, has mostly been immune to the rise of social media. Yes, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows showed up on file-sharing sites a few days before its international release, but that didn’t impact sales at all, despite the wails of complaint from Bloomsbury Publishing. A freely available electronic copy does not seem to interfere with physical sales of printed books. Whether most publishers know this, or care to know it, remains an open question. But how can I sign any publishing deal which constrains my work in ways which, given the points I make in the text, I consider both out-of-step with the times and actually detrimental to the long-term value of the work?

Yesterday, I posted the “Overview” section of the book proposal to this blog. That, in itself, was a remarkably bold act. Book proposals are regarded as “business confidential” material by all parties to a book deal – the author, the literary agent, and the publisher. The ideas contained within the proposal – which reflect the ideas explored in the book – are meant to be kept close to the chest, until the publisher’s marketing machinery cranks up the noise before an impending release. In this sense, book marketing is a carefully scripted, but utterly false drama: “Look at this new exciting thing!” A proposal revealed undercuts this sense of drama, even as it potentially builds up an audience interested in the book. I may have shot myself in the foot by posting this portion of the proposal. I may have made it difficult, if not impossible, to get a book deal. I knew this full well, and posted it anyway.

Now things get thornier. The next sections of the proposal – which I am meant to be writing today – are synopses of the various chapters of the book. They’ll all be short, perhaps a page in length, but will explore the ideas and the narrative structure of each chapter, noting how each builds on the chapter before, giving an interested publisher a good sense of how I’ll build the argument and carry it through to a successful conclusion. This is necessary for a publisher to read, but do I want to reveal it to my audience?

While I do firmly believe in transparency, I instinctively recoil from publicly providing a Cliffs Notes version of my text, which someone could scan through and feel as though they’d absorbed the key ideas in my work. This would not be true, because books always take weird and interesting directions in the writing, directions that even the author remains unaware of until the words appear on the page. But some might think, “Oh yeah, I read his chapter synopses, I know what he’s on about.” Perhaps I shouldn’t care; perhaps these people wouldn’t read my book in any case, freely available or purchased at the bookstore. Perhaps I should simply be glad that some of the space in their heads has been colonized by my ideas. And given that I do believe – and will demonstrate in the book – that sharing expertise results in an aggregate rise in the level of human intelligence, I should be satisfied with this. It is enough.

So here, at the end of this very odd essay – quite unlike any of the others posted on The Human Network blog – you have seen me argue myself into a reasoned position for complete, radical transparency. Transparency incurs costs: people can (and will) steal your ideas, your customers, the food from your mouth. But, in order to seal my ideas, you must first comprehend them, and in understanding my ideas you’ll realize that this kind of theft is impossible. Stealing my ideas only makes them more valuable, and makes me, as the originator of these ideas, more influential. Instead, absorb my work, improve upon it, then share those new ideas. In this way, you too will become influential, and I will find myself borrowing from your work.

In the developed world, mobile phones are completely ubiquitous: only toddlers, the very oldest seniors, and technophobes have resisted their allure. Parents give their children mobiles with global satellite tracking features, so they can search the web to find out where their kids are – and snoop into where they’ve been. Adults use mobile telephones to smooth the frictions of social life: in the age of the mobile, one can phone ahead. No one is late anymore, just delayed. Your productive business life can follow you anywhere – into bed, on vacation, even into the middle of an argument. We enjoy – and suffer through – a life of seamless connectivity.

This is new, and it is very important.

For the nearly two hundred thousand years of human presence on Earth, our lives have been bounded by how far we could throw our voices. Yodelers once scaled Alpine mountaintops to sing to the valleys below; today, a communications satellite, perched 25,000 miles above the equator, can reach half the planet. During the 20th century, radio transmitters (which, like yodelers, started off on mountaintops, but later migrated into orbit) transmitted one message to many receivers. We could hear and then see things that happened far away from our own ears and eyes, and know more about what happened in Washington D.C., on any given day, than what took place in the next town over. As we entered the 21st century, that comfortable (if paradoxical) relationship to the world beyond the reach of our own voices, which most of us had known for most of our lives, suddenly disintegrated. People began to talk with one another.

Nothing at all surprising about that: people have always talked with one another. Communication is arguably the defining feature of homo sapiens sapiens. We are the species that speaks. It is so much of what we are that vast sections of our brains are given over to the understanding of language. Children spend most of their first few years of life, their developing brains working overtime, intently studying every word that comes out of their parents’ mouths, learning to find meaning amidst all those strange sounds.

As a child practices her first few words, she receives encouragement and praise from her parents – who often can’t understand a word she’s saying, but nonetheless applaud every attempt. As she rises into mastery, first with a few simple words, then short phrases, then full-blown sentences, rich with meaning, she joins the “human network,” the age-old web of relationships which define humanity.

Communication shapes us in nearly every conceivable way. If we can not communicate, we are cut off from the common life of our species, and could not hope to survive. But, once we can communicate – with parents and peers – we begin to develop an ever-deepening web of connections with the people around us. This web, formally known as a “social network”, is so important to us that even more of our brain is given over to tending and managing our social networks than the parts used to understand language. Nearly all of our “prefrontal cortex” – the part of the brain which sits directly behind our foreheads – seems to be principally occupied with keeping us well-connected to our fellows.

Until about 10,000 years ago, we lived in tribes, groupings of several interrelated families who hunted and gathered their way across the landscapes of Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. Tribes grew and shrank, through births and deaths, but never grew very large. A large tribe would divide into two smaller ones, along familial lines, and each would go their own way. The natural limit for tribes seems to be around 150 people – beyond that, the tribe always splinters. Why is this? That’s all the space we have in our brains. We can carry around a “mental picture” of about 150 people in our heads, but after that, we just run out of space. We can’t manage a social network any larger than that. We don’t have enough brains.

Fast-forward a hundred centuries: more than half of us now live in cities, not tribes. In our day-to-day lives we don’t feel immediately connected to a hundred and fifty other people. We have close relationships to our families, a handful of friends, and a few colleagues. We are more individual and more isolated than at any time in our common history as a species, yet the largest part of our brain tirelessly works toward building strong connections with others. Over the 20th century, we filled this vacuum with false relations: fans and stalkers, who so idolize their objects of affection (musicians, actors, politicians, etc.) that they built a false idol into their social networks. Ultimately unsatisfying, but better than a widening gyre of emptiness inside our heads.

Our ancestors in the family of man have used tools for at least 2 million years to increase our strength, and extend our capabilities. An obsidian knife is a far better cutting tool than our teeth, and a bone needle better suited to its task than the most nimble fingertips. We domesticated Aurochs (the ancestor of the ox) ten thousand years ago, using their strength to till our fields and carry our loads – and human capabilities took another huge leap forward.

Two hundred years ago, the steam engine multiplied human strength almost infinitely, and produced the Industrial Revolution. As railroads stitched their way across the planet, man could travel faster than a galloping horse; with a steam shovel, he could lift a load that all of Pharaoh’s slaves would have been crushed beneath; and with a telegraph, could he hear or be heard from one end of Earth to the other, in a matter of moments. Technologies are amplifiers; they take some innate human capability and reinforce it, far beyond human limits, until it seems almost an entirely new thing. However alien they might seem to us, technologies are simply the funhouse mirror reflection of ourselves.

Just now – within the last ten years, or thereabouts – we have invented tools which amplify our innate desire to strengthen our human networks. Our wholly human and ancient capacity for communication and connection, so long the poor stepchild of all our technological prowess, is finally coming into its own.

This changes everything, in utterly unexpected ways.

Fishermen in India use text messages to solve a thousand year-old problem with their fish markets, doubling their income; a teenager posts an party invitation to Facebook, and five hundred ‘friends’ show up to make trouble; repressive governments try to clamp down on dissent, only to find their latest outrage available for viewing on YouTube; a band of bloggers, undeterred by every dirty trick thrown at them by a slick bureaucracy, bring down the Attorney General of the United States. None of these singular events were in any way coordinated; no one at an imagined center was telling people to “do this” or “do that”. These things just happened, because our own capabilities as social beings in the human network are already so advanced, and so powerful that, when amplified – even the tiniest bit – we become potent almost beyond imagining.

The world’s vast swath of medium poor put mobile telephones to work and dramatically increase their ability to earn a living, using text messages to multiply the effectiveness of the human networks that we have all used, since time out of mind, to make our way in the world. That’s why a mobile phone is the new “must have” device for everyone on Earth: it’s a tool that helps the poor far more than it helps the rich, because, for the first time, they’re wired into the global human network. They already know how to use these networks – we all do – but the mobile telephone extends their reach, and amplifies their capabilities. This new “globalization” isn’t about spreading franchises of McDonald’s and Starbucks – it’s about a farmer in Kenya being able to call ahead to find out which market offers the best price for his maize crop.

Repeat that individual example a few billion times, and the startling power of the human network begins to reveal itself. We are finding new ways to communicate, connect and improve our lives, each of us carefully watching one other, each of us copying the best of what we see in the behavior of our peers, and applying it to our own lives. As our reach is extended, so is our ability to learn from one another. This global pooling of expertise – or, “hyperintelligence” – leads directly to the phenomenal success of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by millions of individual contributions, each giving the best of what they know, and, in return enjoying the fruits of a planet full of smart people. For just a small contribution, the rewards are so disproportionate (like putting a single chip down on a roulette wheel, and getting the whole casino in return) that Wikipedia defines the first new model for human knowledge creation in at least a thousand years. Wikipedia helps us all to become smarter and more effective, because, by sharing the wealth of knowledge in each of our heads, we help one another make better decisions.

The more we learn to share through the human network, the more powerful we become, both as individuals and in groups. This has a shadow side: a text message, forwarded throughout a community of White Supremacists, led to a race riot on a Sydney beach in December 1995; meanwhile, the loosely-affiliated groups who all call themselves ‘al Qaeda’ pool knowledge and resources in order to make their destabilizing acts of terror increasingly effective. Power is a two-edged sword, and most technologies can be used for good or ill.

At the same time, this new phenomenon of “hyperempowerment” – people using their newly-amplified capabilities in the human network – means that we’re not so easy to push around any more. Consumers can organize against nasty corporate behavior in moments; corporate executives nervously scan endless lists of comments on web sites, anxiously looking for signs of approaching trouble; governments regularly find their constituents running rings around them. The human network puts all of the power relationships that have dominated recent history into play; naturally, those with power are pushing back, but – as in the case of the record companies, who have tried to sue their customers into behaving legally – institutional power finds itself ever more effectively thwarted by diffuse and distributed efforts to oppose it.

The next decades of the 21st century will be dominated by the rise of the human network, as “hyper people power” rises up in unexpected, unpredicted, and sometimes unwelcome ways. The collision of our oldest skills with our newest tools points toward a radical transformation in human behavior and human culture. The energy released in this collision will empower all of us, threaten many of us, and force some of us to rethink our lives. In some ways, we are finally returning to our tribal roots; in other ways, we are, at long last, becoming a global family.

After two hundred years, during which man used machines to amplify his strength, and so shaped the world, we have finally turned that power inward, to reshape ourselves. The Human Network: Sharing, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century tells the story of this epochal shift in civilization, in behavior, in humanity itself. In its 250 pages, it will paint the compelling and accessible picture of the tremendous changes underway, everywhere, in every nation, to every person, as we all become fully-fledged actors in the human network.

One of the things I find the most exhilarating about Australia is the relative shallowness of its social networks. Where we’re accustomed to hearing about the “six degrees of separation” which connect any two individuals on Earth, in Australia we live with social networks which are, in general, about two levels deep. If I don’t know someone, I know someone who knows that someone.

While this may be slightly less true across the population as a whole (I may not know a random individual living in Kalgoorlie, and might not know someone who knows them) it is specifically quite true within any particular professional domain. After four years living in Sydney, attending and speaking at conferences throughout the nation, I’ve met most everyone involved in the so-called “new” media, and a great majority of the individuals involved in film and television production.

The most consequential of these connections sit in my address book, my endless trail of email, and my ever-growing list of Facebook friends. These connections evolve into relationships as we bat messages back and forth: emails and text messages, and links to the various interesting tidbits we find, filter and forward to those we imagine will gain the most from this informational hunting & gathering. Each transmission reinforces the bond between us – or, if I’ve badly misjudged you, ruptures that bond. The more we share with each other, the stronger the bond becomes. It becomes a covert network; invisible to the casual observer, but resilient and increasingly important to each of us. This is the network that carries gossip – Australians are great gossipers – as well as insights, opportunities, and news of the most personal sort.

In a small country, even one as geographically dispersed as Australia, this means that news travels fast. This is interesting to watch, and terrifying to participate in, because someone’s outrageous behavior is shared very quickly through these networks. Consider Roy Greenslade’s comments about Andrew Jaspan, at Friday’s “Future of Journalism” conference, which made their way throughout the nation in just a few minutes, via “live” blogs and texts, getting star billing in Friday’s Crikey. While Greenslade damned Jaspan, I was trapped in studio 21 at ABC Ultimo, shooting The New Inventors, yet I found out about his comments almost the moment I walked off set. Indeed, connected as I am to individuals such as Margaret Simmons and Rosanne Bersten (both of whom were at the conference) it would have been more surprising if I hadn’t learned about it.

All of this means that we Australians are under tremendous pressure to play nice – at least in public. Bad behavior (or, in this case, a terrifyingly honest assessment of a colleague’s qualifications) so excites the network of connections that it propagates immediately. And, within our tight little professional social networks, we’re so well connected that it propagates ubiquitously. Everyone to whom Greenslade’s comments were salient heard about them within a few minutes after he uttered them. There was a perfect meeting between the message and its intended audience.

That is a new thing.

II.

Over the past few months, I have grown increasingly enamoured with one of the newest of the “Web2.0” toys, a site known as “Twitter”. Twitter originally billed itself as a “micro-blogging” site: you can post messages (“tweets”, in Twitter parlance) of no more than 140 characters to Twitter, and these tweets are distributed to a list of “followers”. Conversely, you are sent the tweets created by all of the individu