http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/15/sxsw-2011-internet-online/print
SXSW 2011: The internet is over
Oliver Burkeman went to Texas to the South by Southwest festival of film, music
and technology, in search of the next big idea. After three days he found it:
the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared
• Oliver Burkeman
• The Guardian, Tuesday 15 March 2011
If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was
over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the
teleportation console – I'll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican
restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco.
It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world's
highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them,
and I'd been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too
aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is "user experience",
really? What the hell is "the gamification of healthcare"? Or "geofencing"? Or
"design thinking"? Or "open source government"? What is "content strategy"? No,
I mean, like, specifically?
The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured
cocktail. He looked slightly exasperated. "Well, from one perspective, I
guess," he said, "it's kind of everything."
This, for outsiders, is the fundamental obstacle to understanding where
technology culture is heading: increasingly, it's about everything. The vaguely
intimidating twentysomethings who prowl the corridors of the Austin Convention
Centre, juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the festival's 330-page schedule of
events, are no longer content with transforming that part of your life you
spend at your computer, or even on your smartphone. This is not just
grandiosity on their part. Rather – and this is a technological point, but also
a philosophical one – they herald the final disappearance of the boundary
between "life online" and "real life", between the physical and the virtual. It
thus requires only a small (and hopefully permissible) amount of journalistic
hyperbole to suggest that the days of "the internet" as an identifiably
separate thing may be behind us. After a few hours at South by Southwest
(SXSW), the 330-page programme in my bag started triggering shoulder aches, but
to be honest it was a marvel of brevity: after all, the festival was pretty
much about everything.
We've been hearing about this moment in digital history since at least 1988,
when the Xerox technologist Mark Weiser coined the term "ubiquitous computing",
referring to the point at which devices and systems would become so numerous
and pervasive that "technology recedes into the background of our lives". (To
be fair, Weiser also called this "the age of calm technology", implying a
serenity that the caffeinated, Twitter-distracted masses in Austin this week
didn't seem yet to have attained.) And it's almost a decade since annoying
tech-marketing types started using "mobile" as an abstract noun, referring to
the end of computing as a desktop-only affair. But the arrival of the truly
ubiquitous internet is something new, with implications both thrilling and
sinister – and it has a way of rendering many of the questions we've been
asking about technology in recent years almost meaningless. Did social media
cause the recent Arab uprisings? Is the web distracting us from living? Are
online friendships as rich as those offline? When the lines between reality and
virtuality dissolve, both sides of such debates are left looking oddly
anachronistic. Here, then, is a short tour of where we might be headed instead:
Web 3.0
"Big ideas are like locomotives," says Tim O'Reilly, a computer book publisher
legendary among geeks, embarking on one of the grand metaphors to which the
headline speakers at SXSW seem invariably prone. "They pull a train, and the
train's gotta be going somewhere lots of people want to go." The big idea
O'Reilly is touting is "sensor-driven collective intelligence", but since he
coined the term "Web 2.0", he seems resigned to people labelling this new phase
"Web 3.0". If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the
internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead
of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is
the moment they forget they're doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or
iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses
facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial
transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a
constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real
time, something has qualitatively changed. You're still creating the web, but
without the conscious need to do so. "Our phones and cameras are being turned
into eyes and ears for applications," O'Reilly has written. "Motion and
location sensors tell where we are, what we're looking at, and how fast we're
moving . . . Increasingly, the web is the world – everything and everyone in
the world casts an 'information shadow', an aura of data, which when captured
and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mindbending
implications."
Alarming ones, too, of course, if you don't know exactly what's being shared
with whom. Walking past a bank of plasma screens in Austin that were sputtering
out tweets from the festival, I saw the claim from Marissa Mayer, a Google
vice-president, that credit card companies can predict with 98% accuracy, two
years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce, based on spending patterns
alone. She meant this to be reassuring: Google, she explained, didn't engage in
such covert data-mining. (Deep inside, I admit, I wasn't reassured. But then
Mayer probably already knew that.)
The game layer
Depending on your degree of immersion in the digital world, it's possible that
you've never heard the term "gamification" or that you're already profoundly
sick of it. From a linguistic point of view, the word should probably be
outlawed – perhaps we could ban "webinar" at the same time? – but as a concept
it was everywhere in Austin. Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become
the modern world's leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and
committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your
personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. So why not apply
that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement,
commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals? Three
billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn't some of that energy be
productively harnessed?
This sounds plausible until you start to demand details, whereupon it becomes
extraordinarily hard to grasp what this might actually mean. The current public
face of gamification is Jane McGonigal, author of the new book Reality Is
Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World, but many of
her prescriptions are cringe-inducing: they seem to involve redefining aid
projects in Africa as "superhero missions", or telling hospital patients to
think of their recovery from illness as a "multiplayer game". Hearing how
McGonigal speeded her recovery from a serious head injury by inventing a
"superhero-themed game" called SuperBetter, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
in which her family and friends were players helping her back to health, I'm
apparently supposed to feel inspired. Instead I feel embarrassed and a little
sad: if I'm ever in that situation, I hope I won't need to invent a game to
persuade my family to care.
A different reaction results from watching a manic presentation by Seth
Priebatsch, the 22-year-old Princeton dropout who is this year's leading victim
of what the New York Times has labelled "Next Zuckerberg Syndrome", the quest
to identify and invest in tomorrow's equivalent of the billionaire Facebook
founder. Priebatsch's declared aim is to "build a game layer on top of the
world" – which at first seems simply to mean that we should all use SCVNGR, his
location-based gaming platform that allows users to compete to win rewards at
restaurants, bars and cinemas on their smartphones. (You can practically hear
the marketers in the room start to salivate when he mentions this.)
But Priebatsch's ideas run deeper than that, whatever the impression conveyed
by his bright orange polo shirt, his bright orange-framed sunglasses, and his
tendency to bounce around the stage like a wind-up children's toy. His take on
the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game:
students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail. A good
game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you've failed: you just progress
more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with
zero points and have them strive for the high score? This kind of insight isn't
unique to the world of videogames: these are basic insights into human
psychology and the role of incentives, recently repopularised in books such as
Freakonomics and Nudge. But that fact, in itself, may be a symptom of the
vanishing distinction between online and off – and it certainly doesn't make it
wrong.
The dictator's dilemma
Not long ago, according to the new-media guru Clay Shirky, the Sudanese
government set up a Facebook page calling for a protest against the Sudanese
government, naming a specific time and place – then simply arrested those who
showed up. It was proof, Shirky argues, that social media can't be
revolutionary on its own. "The reason that worked is that nobody knew anybody
else," he says. "They thought Facebook itself was trustworthy." This is one of
many counterintuitive impacts that the internet has wrought on the politics of
protest. But perhaps the most powerful is the one that Shirky – himself a
prominent evangelist for the democratic power of services such as Twitter and
Facebook – labels "the dictator's dilemma".
Authoritarian leaders and protesters alike can exploit the power of the
internet, Shirky concedes. (At least he notes the risks: in another session at
the conference, I watch dumbstruck as a consultant on cyber-crimefighting
speaks with undisguised joy about how much information the police could glean
from Facebook, in order to infiltrate communities where criminals might lurk.
Asked about privacy concerns, she replies: "Yeah – we'll have to keep an eye on
that.") But there's a crucial asymmetry, Shirky goes on. The internet is now
such a pervasive part of so many people's lives that blocking certain sites, or
simply turning the whole thing off – as leaders in Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere
have recently tried to do – can backfire completely, angering protesters
further and, from a dictator's point of view, making matters worse. "The end
state of connectivity," he argues, "is that it provides citizens with increased
power."
The road to that end state won't be smooth. But the compensatory efforts of the
authorities to harness the internet for their own ends will never fully
compensate. Either they must allow dissenters to organise online, or – by
cutting off a resource that's crucial to their daily lives – provoke them to
greater fury.
Biomimicry comes of age
The search engine AskNature describes itself as "the world's first digital
library of Nature's solutions", and to visit it is to experience the curious,
rather disorienting sensation of Googling the physical universe. Ask it some
basic question – how to keep warm, say, or float in water, or walk on unstable
ground – and it will search its library for solutions to the problem that
nature has already found. The idea of "biomimicry" is certainly not new: for
much of the past decade, the notion of borrowing engineering solutions from the
natural world has inspired architects, industrial designers and others. Austin
is abuzz with examples. "Nissan, right now, is developing swarming cars based
on the movements of schooling fish," says Chris Allen of the Biomimicry
Institute. Fish follow ultra-simple mathematical rules, he explains, to ensure
that they never collide with each other when swimming in groups. Borrow that
algorithm for navigating cars and a new solution to congestion and road
accidents presents itself: what if, in heavy traffic, auto-navigated cars could
be programmed to avoid each other while continuing forwards as efficiently as
possible?
The Bank of England, he adds, is currently consulting biologists to explore
ways in which organic immune systems might inspire reforms to the financial
system to render it immune to devastating crises. "And what we're looking for
now," Allen says cryptically, "is an interactive technology inspired by snakes."
'We are meant to pulse'
Until recently, the debate over "digital distraction" has been one of vested
interests: authors nostalgic for the days of quiet book-reading have bemoaned
it, while technology zealots have dismissed it. But the fusion of the virtual
world with the real one exposes both sides of this argument as insufficient,
and suggests a simpler answer: the internet is distracting if it stops you from
doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn't, it isn't. Similarly,
warnings about "internet addiction" used to sound like grandparental cautions
against the evils of rock music; scoffing at the very notion was a point of
pride for those who identified themselves with the future. But you can develop
a problematic addiction to anything: there's no reason to exclude the internet,
and many real geeks in Austin (as opposed to the new-media gurus who claim to
speak for them) readily concede they know sufferers. One of the most popular
talks at the conference, touching on these subjects, bore the title Why
Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy.
A related danger of the merging of online and offline life, says business
thinker Tony Schwartz, is that we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like
computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working
longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But "we were not
meant to operate as computers do," Schwartz says. "We are meant to pulse." When
it comes to managing our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear
perspective with a cyclical one: "We live by the myth that the best way to get
more work done is to work longer hours." Schwartz cites research suggesting
that we should work in periods of no greater than 90 minutes before seeking
rest. Whatever you might have been led to imagine by the seeping of digital
culture into every aspect of daily life – and at times this week in Austin it
was easy to forget this – you are not, ultimately, a computer.
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