Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
David Weinberger, co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and author of
"Small Pieces Loosely Joined," has been making some more noise around the
Web this week. Heck, he's been slashdotted twice in five days, once for an
article (World of Ends, co-written with Doc Searls) that tries to set the
record straight about what the Internet is and isn't, and again for an
article in Salon about David Reed's views on "the myth of interference."

David came to the Internet and to the software industry in the mid '80s
after having taught philosophy for six years. That outlook, plus his 25+
years as a journalist, seems to color his outlook. "Small Pieces," for
example, tries to take seriously the Web's effect on the set of ideas
central to our understanding of ourselves and our world. But David is also
known as a funny writer. (Give him a couple of beers and he'll tell you
about the seven years he wrote gags for Woody Allen's comic strip.)

Leading the conversation with David is our own Jon Lebkowsky. Jon has been
soaking in network culture and virtual community since 1990. He's served as
community host/moderator for The WELL, Electric Minds, and HotWired. He has
written technoculture articles and essays for Whole Earth Magazine, The
Austin Chronicle, 21C, Factsheet Five, Mondo 2000, Mindjack, Wired Magazine
and other publications, and was the "consciousness" sub-domain editor of The
Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and editor/publisher of Fringe Ware Review
and Unshaved Truths.

As co-founder and former CEO of FringeWare, Inc., he was a pioneer in
electronic commerce and its relationship to online community. An Internet
activist, he was involved in initiatives of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and the Global Internet Liberty Campaign, among others. He was
twice President of EFF-Austin, and is a member of The Internet Society, the
Association for Computing Machinery, the Association for Community
Networking, and the Project Management Institute. He served as Online
Community Director for WholeFoods.com and Web Technology Director for
WholePeople.com. Jon is co-founder and CEO of Austin-based Polycot
Consulting L.L.C., a company that provides web consulting and development
services. He just coordinated the revival of EFF-Austin, where he again
serves as president. His weblog, Weblogsky, is at http://www.weblogsky.com.

Welcome to Inkwell.vue, David, I know you and Jon have a lot to talk about!
  

    
Hello, David! Thanks for agreeing to spend some time with us.  I want to
start with the question I recall that you asked at the beginning of your
talk at South by Southwest in Austin a few days ago, which was deceptively 
simple:

What's the web for?
  

    
In one sense, it's a trick question: you could ask "What are computers
for?" and be equally stymied. But in another, I think it's worth
raising because the answers are more varied than for most other
technologies. The Internet has something to do with connecting us, but
beyond that, I find it hard to come up with a single answer that works.

I think that's one reason why the Internet sometimes feels like a
natural resource to mes. "What's the ocean for?" I dunno, what do you
want to do with it? Or maybe it's like: "What are groups for?" To care
about things together. After all, the connections we make on the Web
aren't physical. They're expressions of what we are willing to care
about with others. 
  

    
So, for you, the web is really a social, rather than technical,
phenomenon?
  

    
This should be a softball question, but I actually find it hard, for
two reasons. First, I'm interested in their intersection: how the
social reflects the technical. Second, I'm most interested in how our
(social) experience of the Web affects our ideas. For example, you
could investigate democracy by looking at the sociology of democracies
or the history of their development. You could even put hanging chads
into evidence bags. But you could also investigate democracy as an
idea, which would mean thinking about how it affected our ideas about
freedom, authority, citizenship, liberty, etc. I'm most interested in
the Web as an idea...although I'm still not entirely sure what I mean
by that.
  

    
Is that what you've done in _Small Pieces Loosely Joined_? It strikes me 
as an exploration of the web as an idea, but a three dimensional hologram 
of an idea, which is a little different depending on the perspective you 
take when you look at it.
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
I think that  "3D hologram" is your kind way of saying  "not
rigorous." And "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" is definitely not
rigorous. It isn't an argument with evidence and proof. If only.

The book was provoked by a single question: Since the Web is so weird,
why are we responding to it so deeply? (Those who think that the Web
is merely a good tool or a commercial opportunity think Small Pieces is
insanely irrelevant.) The answer the book comes to is: We've developed
a "default philosophy" that is out of whack with how we actually
experience the world, and the Web reminds us of the truth about what it
means to be human in a shared world.

It's embarrassing to believe that. But I do.
  

    
Can you say more about "what it means to be human in a shared world"? I 
know you have some good concrete examples...
  

    
"Living in a shared world" has become my locution -- one-person jargon
-- for "being alive" or "being conscious." I prefer "living in a
shared world" because it immediately brings in the two terms that too
often get forgotten in our default philosophy: we can only be
individual, conscious humans because we live in the context that is the
world, and we always (always!) understand that world as one that we
share with others.

And so my naive Heideggerianism begins! :)

The two points implicit in the phrase "shared world" are explicit in
our participation in the Web: the web is a rich, messy context that
only matters because it's shared. In this, it is a better reflection of
what it means to be human than is our default philosophy that tells us
that we are primarily individuals and primarily apart from the world. 

(Did you say something about "concrete examples"? Hah!)
  

    <scribbled by jonl Fri 14 Mar 03 12:41>
  

    
It would've made more sense if I'd asked for "examples where the web
reveals that truth"...
 
So what happens when we get into this "profoundly unmanaged" set of nodes
and connections, and we rebuild our world on a technology that "takes
traditional command and control structures and busts them up into many
small pieces that then loosely join themselves..." (crucial phrases from
the book). It seems "messy," as you say... Why are do so many people find
this "messy" way of doing things so compelling?
  

    
Aha! My fault. I owe you a big D'oh, Jon!

I think we find it compelling because it better reflects reality. Life
is messy, despite all our efforts to clean it up. Big chunks of our
day are spent in denial about the randomness and messiness of life,
from businesses that mistake measurement for the measured, to
governments that have careful contingency plans for everything except
what actually happens. We go on the Web and we can speak in our own
voice about the things that matter to us. We can group together in ways
that the group themselves develop. The accretions of extraneous
structure and control and professional tones that we accept because
they're comforting dissolve, at least for a while. Oddly, the
bit-mediated chaos of the Web feels more real than the placidity of
much of RW lives.
  

    
Which is a marked contrast to the perception of the web by people who 
don't spend time there, I think. How do you explain this to people who 
think that computers and the Internet are isolating and alienating those 
who use them? 
  

    
(Loose joints are better than none at all? There's a serious "compared to
what?" issue there -- and I say this as someone who has asked the same sort
of question, Jon.)

Great to have you here, David. Terribly interesting book, tightly argued or
no. My copy of the book is at home, so I can't do chapter and verse (Jon's
just got it memorized, I bet), but I wonder -- in light of what you say
about the Web as shared world -- why you think we don't have that same sense
of our lives in physical space?
  

    
Hello, David. I greatly enjoyed your book because it helped me make
sense of what I've experienced online, in my case,  mainly here on the
Well.This is my only VC, and it took a while to understand the
connections and ebbs and flows. But you put all the interactions in a
perspective I can understand. And you did it with with grace and humor.
Pretty cool!
  

    
Eleanor, thanks so much. That's great to hear.

Bruce, you know that tired old rap about patriarchal Western
philosophy, rationalism, pin it on Descartes, etc.? I believe all that.
What's interesting to me is the way that our beliefs about who we are
and what the world is don't reflect the way we actually live in the
real world. I think we escape (somewhat) those inappropriate,
alienating beliefs on the Web for two basic reasons:

First, the Web is new so we get to start fresh. 

Second, it's harder to make some of the old mistakes on the Web
because the of the ways the Web is different from the RW. For example,
our "default philosophy" says that the RW consists of matter that is
essentially meaningless and indifferent to us. That's pretty
alienating. But there is no matter on the Web, just words and pictures
and songs. That's the "matter" of the Web  and it clearly isn't
meaningless and indifferent the way dirt is.

That's why the Web feels familiar, even in its multitudinous
weirdnesses. It reminds us of the truth that our default philosophy
masks.
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
Jon (#13), it's hard to explain the draw of the Web so many of us feel
to someone who does not. I can tell them that I know far more people,
that I have "efriends" who I expect to keep for the rest of my life,
that circles of friends form who care about one another as much as RW
friends do. But then I also have to say that the friendships are
different: they're intermittent, topical and verbal. This gets heard as
"Oh, they're more frequent but shallower," as if the Internet allows
only promiscuity.

It doesn't feel to me like I've taken my allotment of Friendship
Energy (FE) and have merely spread it more thinly. It feels like I care
more about more people than I did before. As anyone who has had more
than one child knows, the principle of the conservation of energy just
doesn't apply to friendship. Why, it might even be a case of an Entropy
Gradient Reversal!

[Cue the really bad country-western ditty: "The Conservation of
Love."]
  

    
I'd like to know more about some of your other projects. Actually, I know 
something about the cluetrain because I took the ride (signatory in 
'99)... how did you fall in with that particular set of companions? How 
did the cluetrain manifesto come about?  (For those of you who don't know 
about the cluetrain manifesto, see http://www.cluetrain.com/).
  

    
I had known Chris "RageBoy" Locke for about 10 years; he was already
the official Scourge of JOHO, my newsletter. A year earlier or so he'd
e-introduced me to Doc Searls. The three of us struck up a conversation
about how pissed we were about the media's consistent portrayal of the
Web as being about business. We talked for a few weeks via email and
phone, and then Chris wrote a draft of the site incorporating the
various themes. Chris brought Rick Levine around this time. A few days
later, a literary agent wrote and said he thought there might be a book
in this. We liked this guy a lot, and not just because he was talking
about a big paycheck; he's since become a good friend of mine. So, we
wrote up what may be the world's worst book proposal, and he held a
book auction. The book ended up being nothing like the proposal.

The four of us have only all been in the same room twice: once at the
beginning of the summer when we wrote the book and again at the end of
that summer when were finishing it.

I'm afraid to re-read it.
  

    
I think maybe the big thing about the Web as opposed to real life is that
there's no nature on the Web--it's all mediated. It's like the greatest
*medium* ever devised, and there's no landscape or ecosystem or plants or
animals in it, or anything not touched by human hands. It's all human, and
for me it exercises mental muscles that I can avoid using otherwise.
  

    
In Cluetrain you asked the question that you still seem to be
considering - "what's the web for?"  You talk about the web's promise
of a voice, and I see that in the proliferation of weblogs in the kind
of creative online vacuum we saw after the web-as-business bubble
burst. How do weblogs relate to your thinking about the web? (Or should
I say "what are weblogs for?")
  

    
Andrew, yes, I think that is one of the crucial facts: there is no
nature on the Web, so we know that everything we encounter was created
on purpose by another human for some reason. We can't make the mistake
of thinking that what it _is_ is somehow separate from what it _means_.

This is true of all human artifacts, of course. But what makes the Web
different, IMO, is that it's not a medium so much as a world. It's
more like a work of fiction in this regard than it is like a medium.

(Note: Of course much of the content of the Web isn't generated
directly by humans but by computers. But even then we understand that
behind the autocontent is human intention.)
  

    
Jon (#22), I think that the opportunity to speak in our own voices
about what matters to us is one of the big draws of the Web. But the
history of weblogs is illustrative of why it's not just about voice. 

They started as an annotated log of where some nethead surfed today.
Then, when you didn't have to know html to write one and weblogs first
started hitting public awareness, they were often dismissed as the
pimply self-expression of teenagers and other self-absorbed egotists,
yada yada. But these days, a weblog that isn't in fact a conversation
with other weblogs doesn't feel much like a weblog.

In other words, we went from "How much web could a weblog log if a
weblog could log webs?" to Peter Merholz's "we-blog." 
  

    
Just as a corollary: in dreams, everything we perceive is the product of our
own imagination. So the Web is like dreaming in that respect. And it's easy
to forget most of what you see there, too...