you know, people accuse me of being an optimist, which I'm not, if you know anything about history, it's very hard to be optimistic about humans. But I am hopeful, and I think that we who are here having this discussion, paying attention, this discussion, we're descended from a long line of people and creatures who thought the situation is impossible, but there must be some way out of this. In a way, this is one of the insights from my first assage trip. I felt like humans are forcing a bottleneck, and that if we can get through the 20th and 21st centuries, then things are going to look good.
But we're causing all these crises to converge. That's maybe where speech came from. There have been bottlenecks before. Humans were reduced to a couple of thousands, but during a nice age, obviously, those people figured out something to survive and thrive.
I don't know whether the complications that we've made for ourselves are solvable in the time that we have, but it certainly is a challenge. And I think one clue is if we could enable the kind of learning we're talking about, learning about attention, learning about multitasking, learning about the role of left-brain and right-brain information in our environment, learning how to tell good information from bad information that there's no doubt about the power of these networked computers and all of the knowledge that's been put into them. What's doubtful is how many people are really going to use that for their advantage and to beneficial ends. Welcome to the eighth episode of Humans on the Loop.
I'm Michael Garfield, and this is my continuing inquiry into wisdom in the age of magical technologies. We live in a time defined by the agency of what author, critic, and teacher Howard Rheingold famously described as tools for thought, media that expand our minds and enhance our ability to learn and collaborate both for good and ill. But just because we're on the web doesn't make us net smart. Another term from Rheingold's extensive catalog of Pithy idioms.
As anyone with a pocket supercomputer can attest, having information on tap doesn't necessarily result in better attention management, boost our critical thinking, confer a greater capacity to engage in pro-social collective action, or help us stop ourselves from doom-scrolling political news. It has, however, made many of us more aware of and sensitive to the costs of endless distraction, over-reliance on unscrutinized pre-fabricated answers, and complacency as those who do make the most of our digital world's affordances collaborate in ways that complicate and endanger what many of us hold precious. New technologies are not panacea's but double-edged swords we can use to foster community, creativity, and flourishing if we act mindfully of the new risks they produce. Since attention is our greatest natural resource, let's not lose ourselves to the anxieties of living in the big machine, and rather choose to allocate ourselves to developing the skills we need to thrive on this electronic frontier.
And who better to help us than Rheingold himself? A legendary figure whose reporting and counsel from the frothy edge has helped bring into focus everything good that we can become when we embrace the newly online possibilities of peer learning, decentralized coordination, care for the cultural commons, and life as art in community. I'll let him tell his own biography and only introduce him as someone I'm most grateful to bring into humans on the loop as an elder who can speak from decades of hands-on exploration, someone who can teach us all great volumes about how to deepen our humanity in technologically augmented worlds. You're in for a real treat, and I cannot recommend enough that you visit and bookmark this episode's carefully prepared show notes for an entire syllabus of transformative reading.
Before we start, I want to issue a disclaimer that the audio and video on Howard's end of the recording drifted quite a bit, and while I put in several extra days of effort to repair it all, those of you watching this on YouTube are going to notice moments where they don't line up. Please like and subscribe to this channel anyway, and tell your friends about this daring little project. Enormous work goes into making this an unusually high quality series of discussions, and usually that work isn't quite so obvious as it is this week. But when it comes to sharing minds like Howard Rheingold's, I just have to knuckle down and deal, and hope that the extensive prep and grueling post-production will be worth it to the world.
This show is a one-man venture operating on the very edge of possibility. I don't want it to stay that way. It is a labor of love and a leap of faith, a punk bid to offer public goods that help us navigate the transformations of our time, and a counterpoint to shallow tech discourse committed to helping us cultivate the understanding we need to dream better. But if I want this project to realize its potential, I have to recruit the means in order to pay people fairly.
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That's a Saturday. I would love to see you in the mix, and I'll send details for the call out with my next article this Friday. Thank you for listening, and enjoy the one, the only, Howard Rheingold. Okay, Howard Rheingold, you're on the loop.
Thank you so much for being here. I just listened to the talk you gave at Google about 12 years ago, facilitated by your daughter. I really appreciated that intergenerational wedge in there. That was real nice.
Before I get into anything, I would just love you to introduce yourself, however you please with a bit of backstory about you as a young person and the development of the person you became. Well, I'm 77, so that's not a short story. I'll try to abbreviate it as much as possible. I became interested in technology through my interest in consciousness.
When I was 16, I started taking psychedelics very early. This was in 1963, right after Larian Albert were thrown out of Harvard before people called it acid, and it was on sugar cubes. And this, well, it convinced me of a lot of things, or unconvinced me of a lot of things. But one thing that I stuck with was that understanding consciousness is very important.
In college in 1968, there was a psychologist in San Francisco by the name of Joe Camilla, who put electroencephalograph, brainwave measurements on experienced meditators and found out that they emitted alpha frequency a lot more than normal. The interesting part to me was that he then took someone who was not an experienced meditator and sounded a tone whenever alpha appeared in their EEG, and therefore they could learn to do it. And the fact that with feedback, we can learn to control processes in our minds that are normally not consciously controllable. That was very interesting to me.
It's also interesting to me that this was a converging indicator that could be used to study consciousness, which is notoriously hard to study, because of course it's private and internal. And in those days, there was no study of consciousness really because it was the age of behaviorism. So I wrote a thesis at Reed in 1968 that talked about technology and consciousness and the necessity for us to understand it and to be able to manipulate it to a finer degree than drugs to do. And in fact, I did a year of graduate work in neuropsychology.
When it became clear that I did not want to be a scientist, this was in the days of turn on to men and drop out. My wife did not want to live in a van, so we did not drop out. And I'd always been interested in writing, so I decided that becoming a writer would be a way for me to not buy into corporate America and be able to do something that I wanted to do. My father had a job that he really hated.
So when I was very young, I wanted to end up doing something that I liked doing all day. It took me some years to begin to make a living at it. And during that time, I used to type writer. My tools were a type writer, a library card and a telephone.
When I heard rumors that you could write on a screen and rewrite and edit, move paragraphs on a screen instead of having to retype the whole page, I became very interested in that. And eventually talked my way into a job writing articles for Xerox Park. Alan Kay had written an article in the 1977 Scientific American on Microelectronics and the Personal Computer. I highly recommend that article to show where he or the people at Park knew where things were going.
She whizzed. That was seven years before the Macintosh. So that got me into understanding, well, at Park I got to Doug Engelbart. And that convinced me that these personal computers that were just emerging then, well, for me, would be much more than a better typewriter that they were, in fact, my amplifiers.
And I wrote a book published in 1985 called Tools for Thought, History and Future of Mind Amplifying Technology. So it happened that I was making a living as a freelance writer at the same time that the personal computer revolution was happening in our area. For me, I'm interested in what things going and what they're going to do to us as individuals and as a society. But also they were personal tools.
And I often think now with everything that's available, I started out with a horse and buggy and a starship. I'm involved with what's now called Social Media with Amodam and The Source. That was too expensive. And then I joined the well, which was started by the people at Whole Earth and ended up writing an article on virtual communities in the 1987 issue of Whole Earth Review and a book in 1992 called The Virtual Community.
Again, throughout this process of writing these books, I came in contact with critics and the scholars who asked the question, are these things, personal computers, social media? Are they any good for us as individuals or as a society? The question I had been asking, 13 years ago in 2012, I wrote a book called NetSmart because my answer to that question was that I thought it was no longer a matter of hardware or software, but a matter of literacy, that if people knew you and most people who are knowledgeable about online media know that basic literacies that those individuals would do a lot better and that if there were enough of those individuals, it would improve the comments. And we can loop back to this because 13 years later, I don't see our educational institutions teaching kids how to determine the real information for the bad information.
I don't see them teaching attention control. So the five literacies I wrote about in NetSmart started with attention. I know that's of interest to you and we can get back to that. I wrote another book that was published in 2001 about the new possibilities for collective action that the merger of the mobile phone and the internet, what we now know is the smartphone.
I call that book Smart Mobs. I became concerned when my daughter was in college that these college kids, they were into it, but they were not learning anything about it. So I ended up teaching courses at Berkeley and Stanford, one on digital journalism. That was something they invited me to teach because I needed someone.
I created two courses, one originally called Virtual Community Issues and then I changed to social media issues and another course on social media literacies and I taught for 10 years. I did a TED talk in 2005 because my work on Smart Mobs convinced me that we humans don't really understand enough about how we cooperate and how we fail to cooperate and met a new interdisciplinary science of cooperation would be useful. I worked on that for a couple of years with Institute for the Future and I made an online course about cooperation theory and I made it all of the syllabus and the videos from that course available as a free PDF now. So I'm retired, I make art and I'm still interested in things.
And then the COVID lockdown forced teachers to teach through Zoom and most people hated it. I wrote about how online learning can be effective and engaging. It does require a shift in pedagogy because it's no longer a one to many medium and that there has to be a different involvement of students in their own learning. And so I guess that's the fastest I can summarize my 77 years.
That was impressively fast. Okay. So because you have this connection through LSD and you probably know better than I, the story that people sitting at keyboards and mice operating on graphical user interfaces, emerging to Doug Engelbart during an LSD trip in a Stanford study in 1955, you quote Clay Shurkey talking about there's no such thing as information overload, just filter failure. I'm thinking a lot about the way that the self is reconstituted in digital media and its relationship to the disinhibition of functional brain connectivity in the psychedelic experience.
The way that taking a trip opens the door into parts of the brain that are normally inaccessible or the mind and how this experience has in some kind of braided way generated a history in which we have created an immediate environment for ourselves that I consider distinctly psychedelic and is in certain ways maybe doing the job without the acid that like I feel like to live online is a psychedelic experience. Richard Doyle said that psychedelics or as he calls them, echodelics are training wheels for the conditions of transhumanism, but he means a very specific kind of transhumanism that he attaches to yoga rather than records while you know this notion of the self as yoked to the network to greater forces, emergent within fields of interactivity. And I would just love to hear you speak to that specifically because I think that the matter of training one's attention, yes, is an important initiation in learning to navigate the transition from a kind of atomic reductionist selfhood to an emergent network permeable selfhood. I would just kick it back to you and let you go on that for as long as you care to.
Well, there's a lot there. I will say one thing about life online, which is I don't know whether I would call it psychedelic, but it certainly expands both our social and epistemic worlds. When I first started thinking about writing about the internet pre-web days, I felt that the three major characteristics that made the medium different from previous media was that first of all, it's many to many, instead of a few people deciding what a large number of people read in their newspapers or see on their television. Now every desktop or every telephone is a broadcasting station.
That doesn't mean you're going to get everybody's attention, but it means that you can in a way that never was possible before. Secondly, you can make contact with people who share your particular interest, even though you never knew of them and they may even be on the other side of the world. This is really important. You're the only 18-8 turn in a small town.
It's a lifeline. If you have a disease that only one in a million people have, there are probably a thousand others you can contact. At the same time, if you are a terrorist or a fascist, you can find your friends and organize with them. There's this saying that rising tide lifts all boat and media from the alphabet on enable people to do things that they weren't able to do before and to be able to do things with more power.
And some of those things are motivated by beneficial impulses and some of them are motivated by destructive impulses because humans are that way. What we're seeing is an amplifier of what humanity is, even though that amplifier is in the process of changing how we perceive it. I will say that the major learning from psychedelics, and I took a fair amount of it, but I'm of the school that you only need to do at once to get this, which is that the way we see the world, the way we understand ourselves is but one of many, perhaps an infinite number of ways to take our sense perceptions and our thoughts and make a model of the world that we believe in, that not only is normal waking consciousness not the only one, but we could change it. It got me interested in neurofeedback.
Maybe we can become more conscious of that. Neurofeedback is not that deep. It's an account online mind manifesting, which is what's psychedelic things. I think we're seeing that it is, and it's not just the ego, it's being manifested out there.
I didn't invent this, but I think it's important. I think it's useful to evaluate a new communication medium by thinking, what will 4chan do with it? I think it's important to understand that if you're amplifying human capabilities, you're going to amplify some destructive ones as well. Again, I think education or learning makes a difference, which brings us to attention.
I don't think that anybody can test that with all the benefits we're getting online, that there's an attention problem. One face of the attention problem is what's been called surveillance capitalism. The fact that it is profitable to capture attention online and to keep it so that you can sort ads, and that is a loop because there are better and better ways of manipulating attention. I think that there's a way to deal with that.
The other part of the problem is I notice this when I travel a lot. You can stand waiting to cross the street at any intersection in any major city in the world, and probably all of the people around you are looking at their phone. When I started thinking about this with my daughter, who was coming of age and using online media, and with my students, I looked into it a little bit. I won't pose as a scientific expert, but both neuroscience and contemplative traditions say that in the normal state of affairs, our attention is untamed.
On literate, we don't really have a vocabulary of attention. We don't really understand how we can focus our attention on one thing or stop focusing it on another. And the good news is that paying attention to your attention works. So one thing I started calling it info attention, and I started teaching about that.
Attention particularly when you're online. I ask my students, take a little piece of paper or post a note and write two or three things that you're supposed to accomplish by the end of the day. That's why you're at your computer ostensibly. And just put it in the corner.
And every once in a while, it will catch your attention. And just think to yourself, what time is it, what am I supposed to be doing, and what have I done? It's simply a matter of making you aware of the difference between your intention and the rabbit holes that the world online can lead you through. And then you can be led through attention management.
So I think if I was to teach two things to young kids, one would be, how do you do a little research to find out which of the answers you get online are true and which of the mark-use information and disinformation? I think that's critically important. And we can go back to that because I think there's an arms race going on there. And also, how can you train your attention?
How can you pay attention to how your use of media changes your attention? And when is that good for you? And when is it not good for you? I'm not saying that going down rabbit holes is a bad thing.
I'm just saying that most people do it without knowing that they're doing it. Another thing I have to say about life online is your body is involved in life online like this. You're moving your fingers. We're embodied beings and our consciousness is attached to a body.
And I think AI is going to have to come up against that. There are things that you cannot do without having the experience of manipulating a body in gravity and for dimensional space. I did write a book on virtual reality in 1990. And back then, I thought this is going to take a long time for this to be anything that more than enthusiasts will use.
And it turns out that that's still true. We might become more embodied if virtual reality wasn't so cumbersome. I also think that as opposed to living online with a two-dimensional screen, that people's bodies, our vestibular systems, react to being in a physical space that doesn't correspond with the actual physical space. And people get sick in it after a while.
So again, I think that this embodiment is part of it. I'm thinking of a big part of the psychedelic experience is understanding that you are a living being surrounded by living beings on a planet full of living beings in a universe which as far as we know is dead, as far as the telescope can see. I thought that freaks me out from time to time. If we're alone, things are too important.
But the point is we're in a very rare state being a living being on this planet. And for almost all of us, that consists of having a body. And there's a real difference there, I think. Yeah, so I want to prompt some exploration of this.
You mentioned Linde Stone's work on continuous partial attention. And I think when people talk about cultivating attention, they're really thinking about focusing on one thing. And you've actually been very kind in your treatment of the utility of being able to multitask in situations that call for it. I'm thinking also of recent research that suggests that ADHD, as a diagnosable disorder, may actually be a phenotype that was expressed more frequently in hunter-gatherer societies because they did this study where they found that those who had been diagnosed were better at pattern matching tests.
There was this relationship between movement and novelty and stimulus. And so, yeah, there's something about your comments on embodiment and this notion that the metaphors that we use when we're talking about engaging with quote unquote information flows online often suggest like surfing the web that we're moving while we are sitting still. It's kind of like one of those optical effects where it seems like you are in motion because the optical stimulus is moving in a certain way. I would love to hear you talk about how to cultivate the discernment with respect to when to engage octopus mode.
A lot of people identify with this notion that you're doing all the things all at once. And that's obviously certainly the phenomenology of recognizing the self as collective, right? We're not just talking about telescopes, we're talking about microscopes and peering into the sub-loops of the human and the processional nature of life. But yeah, like when is it good to choose the blinders?
When is it good to engage in single-pointed concentration? And when otherwise? The last thing I'll stack on this is Ian McGill-Chris's work on hemispheric lateralization. And this notion that the left hemisphere is very instrumental and optimized and goal-seeking and predatory or as the right hemisphere is very peripheral and diffuse and pattern-seeking intrinsic in its appreciation of things.
Like a prey animal would be a signing agency where otherwise there may not be. And that the telescope that casts our attention into space and sees a lifeless world might be the apotheosis of a left hemisphere technological mentality. But that it brought us into seeing the strangely michelial clusters of dark matter and energy connecting galaxies in the deep field and suggests that some of these patterns are as below so above and that we may be on the cusp of becoming aware of the fact that much of what we thought was dead, including our technological infrastructure, has in some even more fundamental information theoretic way characteristics like life and that therefore to live online there are benefits to this sort of right-brained prey animal like Doug Rushkoff talks about fractal noia. You know, I think paranoia is obviously a neurosis that has become very amplified through our life and networks for some.
But beyond that is a kind of reconciliation of these two approaches. And mastery to the extent that we can talk about mastery as a goal seems to involve both a cultivation of personal agency and a submission to or devotion to the reality of one's participation in all of this. And so yeah, back to you. Well, multitasking.
You know, when I first came across the research, Cliff Nast at Stanford and others, it pretty definitively demonstrated that the people who think they're being more efficient at their tasks by multitasking are actually it takes time when you shift your attention to get back to what you were thinking on the other task. I resisted that because I consider myself to be a multitasker. I'm forced to admit that it doesn't make me more efficient. And let's get back to that because efficiency isn't everything.
But I immediately started looking for counter-examples. There's one counter-example that's pretty obvious and that is a jet fighter pilot who has to navigate, communicate, and aviate simultaneously in three dimensions at the speed of sound with their life on the line. And they've got these heads up displays showing them all kinds of information and voices in their ears. So obviously some people can be trained to do that.
And I wonder are these people who have a particular talent or is it holy in the training? The other thing that got me to thinking about it was my Berkeley class, I took a little video from my point of view of what it looked like to me because if you're a teacher these days, you are looking at a bunch of laptop screens that are facing students, not you. And then I put it on YouTube and I came back to class and I showed it on the big screen. And in the back of the room, I recorded from the back of the room.
And there was one student who switched from launching the screen to looking up the YouTube video and viewing the YouTube video on his own screen. And then he switched to looking through my personal website and then switched to looking at some of the books on my website. And what was interesting to me was that this is one of the one in 100 A plus students. So obviously this fellow knew how to throw his attention around without it impacting his ability to get good grades.
I don't know whether that's the same thing as learning. So I think again, like the need for an interdisciplinary study of cooperation, which we are beginning to see now 20 years after I talked about it, we need to look at the degree to which multitasking can be trained and whether it should be trained. And now to this part about efficiency, you know, there was a technological critic by the name of Jacques Loll that very few people know about these days. He wrote a book called Love Technique in French and translated it as the technological society.
This was in the early 1950s when there weren't very many computers and I would perhaps oversimplify distilled his point to efficiency colonizes everything. Once you find a more effective way of doing something, other ways of doing that thing, whether or not. And maybe in regard to the humanities side of learning, efficiency is an obstacle in that being able to see modifications and go down that rabbit hole and come back and maybe not do as well at focused work, but bring in a lot of strands that wouldn't have been brought in otherwise. Maybe there's something to that.
Again, this is all wild. Nobody studying how you can train people to do this. And I'm holding out the possibility that maybe wild talents and that it's not something that can be trained. But you know, I was really interested in, there's a man who studies reading by name of Stenislaus de Hain and he did some psychological and neurological studies on people reading.
In terms of reading, it's not something that humans are biologically equipped to do. We have biologically evolved to recognize simple symbols. Maybe we're looking at a track in the mud and we have to decide immediately is this something I want to chase because I could eat it or is it something I want to run away from because it might eat me. We have learned to make abstractions to understand that symbols represent sounds and those sounds represent things in the world.
That all has to do with a part of our brain that sequences things. Maybe from throwing stones where we had to calculate where to throw the stone. All of these different parts of the brain don't normally work together. Everything reading forces you to use these biological adaptations into what's called an excapitation.
They're creating a new capability out of old ones. Dinosaurs developed feathers probably because they were good cooling systems. A light dinosaur jumped off a rock and then it's an example. And those dinosaurs we produce a lot better.
So I think that we're dealing with the same kind of thing that if we understood better the nature of our attention and our desire to multitask and the purpose of focus and the relationship between the two and we're able to train people the way that we are able to train people to read then maybe we would have a more humane as well as effective cyborg. We're not just more efficient but we are more able to try to understand the context of what's happening. Again, our understanding of what our technology is due to us, what we can do about it and how we can teach people is very slow compared to the way the technologies evolve so quickly. And I think of it as an arms race when we're talking about information and disinformation because when my daughter first started using search engines before Google existed I could show her that you could determine to some degree what was real information and what was not real information but combination of surveillance capitalism making money for people who are able to understand how to manipulate attention better and AI enabling the production of extremely realistic untruth that's the side of disinformation is way ahead of the side of finding your way through it.
And in fact I see that with the large language models we're facing a similar situation because as far as we know now we'll never be able to have large language models that don't hallucinate, that don't produce wrong information. Well that's been true of search for a long time. You can ask any question any time anywhere and get a million answers and it's up to you to determine what's real and what's not. I think that already large language models are extremely useful tools for people who know how to use them and what their limitations are.
But I also think that with deep fakes and whatever is going to come along after it the production of effective disinformation is outpacing the production of effective literacy on determining what's accurate and what's real. So this seems like a perfect spot to pin something that you brought up with your daughter at the Google talk on life online and the link you drew between that and lucid dreaming. This question of am I awake and writing a note to yourself, just remembering to check to verify. You know when I started thinking about deep fakes and the consequences to society back in 2017 at the scholar Regina Rene at York University had written a piece about the loss of what she called the epistemic backstop in our confidence in photographic and videographic record which seems to be parallel to the challenges in expert identification at scale and how decision making in an accelerated information environment often puts us in situations where we have to trust implicitly that someone actually knows what they're talking about but this is a very complicated situation, it's a complex situation.
So yeah I know that you've gestured toward the idea of social verification and algorithmic verification, you know some combination thereof for dis info busting. I think of someone else I intend to have in this series is Puzia Olhaver who co-authored a piece with Vitalik Buterin and Glen Weil on the decentralized society where she suggested that credentials for a network society could be imagined as non-transferable tokens on distributed ledgers that allow us to bridge between intersubjective agreement and something like an nth person, super objectivity because we're no longer relying on print era modern credential systems like the PhD but we can figure out which perspectives agree across the greatest diversity of locally constituted positions. So this is like the backing for more kind of liquid democracy in quadratic voting and so on. So yeah I don't know I'm actually talking about two different things.
One is the way that the state of things that you're pointing to in a way has mainstreamed what the rational enlightenment actually did for only a small fraction of the population which was it has made it a matter of everyone's business that we bring greater rigor to our statement and our encounter of validity claims. I think it's making more of us inherently scientific in those for whom it's not just plunging us into nihilism right but there's this other piece which is that figuring out how we can navigate this together seems like it's no longer just a question of am I dreaming but are we dreaming of finding ways of us keeping ourselves accountable community oversight or surveillance these kinds of things so I take that wherever you will. Okay there are a bunch of things there. You know when you started talking liquid democracy occurred to me before you mentioned to oversimplify is the idea that I may know someone who is far more qualified than I on economic issues and another one who knows more than on education and maybe there's some way that I could give them my vote proxy that when the issue has to deal with that.
When you're talking about a combination of algorithm and social methods for finding our way through bad information I wrote about that quite a while ago I was thinking about well you could have an algorithmic method that would take a statement on a website and search on what other people have to say about that author for example which is something that anybody can do but if you could do it on a very large scale it would be useful. The other thing might be again like liquid democracy I have friends who are far more technically knowledgeable about particular subjects than I am if I could have just some kind of easily accessible network that would enable me to rely on my networks expertise to qualify that information some interplay between the algorithmic and the social would enable me to steer my way through this very rich but uncertain information environment but you know this whole conversation is about a very small fraction of the educated world who even think about these things. Again you know there's a kind of a wild segue there but there's a difference between learning and education and education is an institution for forming citizen workers in a particular kind of society. I used to tell my students if you took a warrior from a thousand years ago and put them on a modern battlefield they would die immediately.
If you took a surgeon from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern surgical operating theater they would not know what to do but if you put someone from a thousand years ago five thousand years ago into a classroom they would know who sits where and who keeps quiet and who talks and who pays attention and that whole monies broken down as our societies become more complex. This is an old argument I won't get too much into detail with the journalistic argument but you know there were a lot of similar hominids like seven or eight different subspecies around at the same time. Why did human homo sapiens dominate? Anthropologist Joe Henrik has a good answer in his book, The Secret of Our Success, that biological evolution shapes your fitness to your environment over very long periods, very slowly.
Cultural evolution if someone discovers fire everybody in the tribe knows how to make a fire and not only that they're great grandchildren we'll probably know how to make a fire and then someone else in that tribe finds out that if you throw a piece of meat on the fire it will help you digest it much more easily. Then again that knowledge ratchets throughout the group and of course what we've got today with the internet is a potential mega learning machine. Up until very recently if you wanted to learn just about anything school's out of monopoly. Now you can search, you can go to lectures from any university in the world.
I did some lectures on what I call peer go jig which is we've got all the tools available for us to learn outside of the institutional context and many do. I mean research shows that young gamers they teach each other. Peer learning is very advanced among a lot of gamers. If you were to ask a 14 year old how would you learn to play the ukulele or configure a web server they would say youtube or tiktok.
All of those methods are available, it's not really available, it's how do you do it? I think again maybe I'm thinking ahead too far on this that if that knowledge was disseminated that people would be able to learn without the necessary context of the school room. You know all of this conversation we've been having it really comes back to what you know about how to do things and people accuse me of being an optimist which I'm not. If you know anything about history it's very hard to be optimistic about humans but I am hopeful and I think that we who are here having this discussion paying attention to this discussion we're descended from a long line of people and creatures who thought the situation is impossible but there must be some way out of this.
In a way I think and this is one of the insights from my first asset trip. I felt like humans are forcing a bottleneck and that if we can get through the 20th and 21st centuries then things are going to look good but we're causing all of these crises to converge. That's maybe where speech came from there have been bottlenecks before humans were reduced to a couple of thousands during a nice age. Obviously those people figured out something that to survive and thrive.
I don't know whether the complications that we've made for ourselves are some of them at the time that we have but it certainly is a challenge and I think that one clue is if we could enable the kind of learning we're talking about learning about attention learning about multitasking learning about the role of left brain and right brain information in our environment learning how to tell good information from bad information that there's no doubt about the power of these network computers and all of the knowledge that's been put into them. What's doubtful is how many people are really going to use that for their advantage and to beneficial ends. That's a learning issue if you know anything about history it's very hard to be optimistic about humans but I am hopeful and I think that we who are here having this discussion paying attention this discussion we're descended from a long line of people and creatures who thought the situation is impossible but there must be some way out of this. In a way I think this is one of the insights from my first ass intro.
I felt like humans are forcing a bottleneck and that if we can get through the 20th and 21st centuries then things are going to look good but we're causing all of these crises to converge. Just maybe where speech came from there have been bottlenecks before humans were reduced to a couple of thousands during a nice age. Obviously those people figured out something to survive and thrive. I don't know whether the complications that we've made for ourselves are some of them at the time that we have but it certainly is a challenge and I think that one clue is if we could enable the kind of learning we're talking about learning about attention learning about multitasking learning about the role of left brain and right brain information in our environment learning how to tell good information from bad information that there's no doubt about the power of these network computers and all of the knowledge that's been put into them.
What's doubtful is how many people are really going to use that for their advantage and to beneficial ends. That's a learning issue. It's also an education issue but education by its nature is a conservative institution that changes very slowly. Critical thinking is essential.
It's a problem if you're a teacher or a parent to teach critical thinking because that requires you to allow your children and your students to question you. The question is already. It's hard to do even if you believe in it. I don't know what the answers are but I think identifying the key problems.
The beginning to do that. When McArsley Foundation put $50 million into digital media they call it the digital media and learning not the digital media and education effort quite deliberately. There's a lot of great learning going on outside of classrooms and these media enable it. It's just blind.
It's not tamed. It hasn't been turned to thousands of people. What we're facing now is no longer the house and I have not. I think most people on earth now have a phone.
If not a smartphone and it's connected to the internet. A fisherman off the coast of India knows which port already has sufficient. Which port they're going to get a good price on it. It's a gap between those who know how and those who don't know how.
So on that note this question of the relationship between personal empowerment and the empowerment of the commons. I want to articulate that with this question of how to reconcile agency across scales. You have said that your position is that technologies afford but do not compel behavior and yet you and I both recognize that the more efficient the mechanisms of what we can call surveillance capitalism although I think it's more than that in some sense. The mechanisms by which attention is harvested and behavior directed.
You know what about fifth generation warfare. A bright side here that I keep thinking about is a learning versus an educational frame gets us back to something more local. When you talk about for instance Tim O'Reilly's comments on the architectures of participation. Public goods for personal benefit and vice versa and articulating these things.
I get the sense that the way into better worlds involves squaring the circle of the recruitment of individual reward mechanisms into behaviors that are of collective benefit. But that still allow local sense making and self determination. And that do not just like collapse everything into this sort of context free highly fungible aggregate but keep things very present and high touch. I feel like somewhere at the intersection of multi scale regulation, multi scale markets, the local production of culture, what it means to get back into more pre modern intergenerational learning and collective decision making.
There are ways that the digital tools that we have empower us to do this such that we can collaborate at a national or planetary scale while remaining true to the needs of the moment and the place. This is another huge bite that I've broken off but I would love to hear you talk about the reconciliation or the synthesis of the small here and the small now with the big here and the long now and like how you can tell a story about the tools at our disposal and perhaps AI in particular as something that allows us to observe statistical regularities at multiple different scales and make these things visible to us at multiple scales of regulation. How you see that all coming together. So you mentioned architecture participation.
It's particularly interesting in that because it is a technological version of what Eleanor Ostrom called the institutions for collective action. So nobody thinks I am making Google more valuable when they put a link on the website. Google aggregates all those decisions and comes up with a search engine. It was acts of individual self interest add up to a commons that's valuable for everyone.
Corey Doctorow called Napster an instance of a sheet that should grass and that Napster in the olden days for those of you who are not old was a way that people illegally shared music by opening the folder on desktop and their computer that was dedicated to Napster and other people had the freedom to go look through that folder. However, the architecture of it was if you're going to look through somebody else's Napster folder, you have to leave your Napster folder open for others to look at. So again, it's sheet that should grass its consumption that provisions itself. Something that the technology enables that hasn't really possible on scale before.
You started out by talking about the individual in the commons and when I taught cooperation theory, really at the heart of that is what's called the social dilemma and social dilemmas when individual rationality adds up to collective irrationality. It is rational for me to jump in my car and hop on the freeway. If a billion other people do it, we've got traffic jams, we have fatalities and we pump carbon into the atmosphere. That wasn't my intention in acting in my own self interest, but the classic on this is Garrett Hartman's tragedy of the commons in which he compared human population growth to what happened to the common grazing areas when everybody could just graze for free.
Nobody was being selfish about it. They just wanted to maximize how many she could graze and eventually the commons disappeared. Courtney Hartman is a tragedy because it's inevitable. Interestingly, a political scientist by name of Eleanor Ostrom asked, well, does the data really show that?
And she studied water sharing systems and police systems and all kinds of ways in which individual needs and collective needs collided and people came up with a way to make it work. People upstream have no incentive to share water with people downstream. Or a water user in your well is pumping water because you're near the coast. You have no way of knowing whether it's happening to all your neighbors because none of you wants to pay to have that survey done.
But in lots of instances, her classic book is called governing the commons. She found out that people were able to harvest or fish or use water or come up with policing schemes because they created workarounds for the social dilemma. I'll move back to the different kinds of social dilemmas, but she also found that I think this is very important. Those institutions, those agreements that were successful had several design characteristics that they all shared.
One of them was clear boundaries. You know, what's inside the territory, what's outside the territory, who is authorized, who's not authorized, norms and rules for sanctioning people who break the norms and rules. And sanctioning them in a graduated manner, not an all or non-matter, a relatively inexpensive, relatively fair system of settling disputes. So in Southern California, how was water allocated?
Well, people tried different things and they were sued for it. Eventually, the courts came up with agreements that a lot of people felt was workable. So the different kinds of social dilemmas, the one I think most people know about is the prisoners, the one I won't get into the whole explanation of it. But the idea is that people who don't know each other enough to trust each other, who have to make a decision that affects both of them, will protect their own interests rather than maximizing their mutual benefit and lose out that way.
There are workarounds for that social dilemma by creating an institution for collective action. Another one is called stag hunt. If I go hunting by myself, I might bring a oner rabbit for my family. If I forgo that and I join with my neighbor, we might be able to bring down a stag and we'll lead for a long time.
Anyway, if you look up social dilemmas, you'll find that there are a number of them. And in fact, they've been demonstrated in other species as well. What our species has, again, back to the cultural evolution is that eventually some people figure out ways that we can get around these. There's a really great book by Lansing called Perfect Order, about the way the water is shared in Bali.
And this was something that evolved ecologically and socially, and it has a kind of religious ritual veneer on it. But there are all kinds of ways that we do this. Again, economists, biologists, computer scientists all have little clues about how to overcome social dilemmas, how cooperation works. There hasn't really until very recently been a way of trying to put those together.
I know that Athena, at tipist at Arizona State University, has an interdisciplinary study of cooperation. I understand that another one is starting at the University of Amsterdam. But again, there's evidence that we can solve some of these problems by understanding them better and applying the affordances of our technologies to work around the differences between individual self-interest and the commons. It's probably the biggest issue that we're facing.
So yeah, I guess to approach this from another angle, there's that bumper sticker, don't believe everything you think. And I know you are an artist and that art is important to your practice. You might say instrumental. I think a lot about Andreas Wagner's work on the evolutionary utility of play.
And when you're talking about, again, biological evolution versus cultural evolution, the more complex, the more rapidly changing or unstable in an environment, the more you have to lean into a cultural learning period. So maybe one of the defining characteristics of human beings is that we take a very long time to grow up because we live in this extremely complex social milieu. And that links us back into the asterisk you put on efficiency earlier in the conversation. And this question of optimization for what, you know, it's hard to get people to collaborate on a stag hunt if they feel like they are in competition.
And so this is just like another storytelling question, which is, you know, this morning I was engaged with David Passiak on Facebook. I saw Dave Snowden had gotten into kind of a tangle with him about his particular approach to using a chain of reasoning way to engage with large language models. And David had said something to the effect of, you know, get on the surfboard or you're going to get washed away, which is a very common trite. And in my opinion, an uninspired statement that comes out of the tech world a lot.
And it's like, well, I would love to hear from you how to hold skeptically one zone anxieties about living in such an intensely metamorphic and turbulent time and strategies for cultivating the kind of curiosity and play that seem required for us to poke out of the hole, to doubt our models, to engage in collective improvisation, to make time for art at an organizational institutional level, to fund things that are of intrinsic importance rather than simply those things that are legible to the profit calculus. Like all of this at whatever level you care to engage it seems to be saying the same thing, which is that lightness in our relationship to the real. And there's that great quote, like, my parents were born in the fuck around century and I'm born in the find out. It's like, no, I think there's quite still a lot of fucking around that we want to do here if we are going to find out something good.
So like, this is a question about concrete praxis at the level of a person at the level of a group of people to break things open so that organizations can learn so that people can embrace change that may be forced upon them with a bit of a welcoming sort of empowered jazzy attitude. Make art. And make art with friends. So my mother was an art teacher and her philosophy was that we're all artists.
Art is something that we need and something that enriches us and something that enlarges our view of ourselves and the world. But when we're very young, most people are shut down. Someone looks over your shoulder and says, well, you can't draw a horse. You can't do art.
It's not about drawing a horse. It's about having a conversation with yourself that is sacred rather than instrumental. The mythologist, Mary C. Iliad made the distinction between instrumental activities are things that you do in order to get something, to do something, to accomplish something.
Again, efficiency enters there. Sacred things are things that you do for yourself. If you're dancing in a group, then no matter how much you don't think about it, you are performing for other people. And there's an instrumental aspect to that.
Maybe you want to get laid. If you dance with yourself, buy yourself that sacred. You're doing it just to do it. And whether you take a piece of clay or whittle a piece of wood or make some marks on paper with some media or another or you use Arduino to control LEDs, you are engaging in a conversation with yourself that most of the time doesn't require words.
And I think that in itself is a kind of training of, I don't have to be involved in getting what I want. I don't have to be involved in doing what others want me to do all of the time. There is a time in which I can do something for myself. And you know what?
If you do it throughout your life, it builds on itself, this conversation with yourself without words. And to me, it's been essential. And in fact, at the Institute for the Future, they answered an art show and they said, you have to explain what art has to do with futurism. So I wrote an autobiography that you can find in which I talk about how doing future forecasting means doing a lot of homework about infrastructures and emerging signals that also has to do with intuition.
And you can't really train your intuition until you have some practice trusting your intuition. And art is all about that. And you know what? When you make a mistake in a painting, that's a challenge to making a different painting than the one you started out with.
Art with friends, if you look at Pataphysics.us, you will find that on Saturdays I gather with a group of people and we make things, we used to make things for big rock and roll shows and we make things for burning them out and now we just make things for each other. We're making a time machine and there's an explanation of what that means. And we just get together and make art. And you know, some of us are product people, engineers, going to have a blueprint and a set of milestones.
And some of us are what are called bricholurs. We just throw some substance on the table and mess with it and then become something. And so when you have those two kinds of people working collaboratively on something, it creates a really interesting creative friction. And you come up with solutions that neither side would have come up with in the first place.
So we're talking about the individual, about cultivating the intuitive, non-verbal, expressive side of yourself. And we're also talking about groups of people creating something together for fun who have to somehow reconcile their different approaches. That's great collaboration. Again, this is kind of an off the wall segue.
You know, technologies evolve in ways that people just don't predict. Writing started out as a way of accounting for the number of bushels of wheat or the number of sheep or the number of, and forests of wine that you exchanged. What they used to do is they would take a clay image of sheep and then they would bake it into an clay envelope. And if you wanted to check out a contract, you had to bring the envelope and count the sheep.
A couple centuries later someone figured out, why don't I take one sheep and just make a bunch of bark on the envelope and we can tell by looking at the outside, you know what, for hundreds of years, that was used for accounting. Eventually, someone figured out, wait a minute. Well, we could communicate other things with this. That was not what it was intended to do.
Computers were intended to make the H-bomb. Well, there's a great new book about John von Neumann that talked all about that. The Man from the Future is kind of the official biography. There's another one that's a little bit more fictional.
But, you know, until Doug Engelbart, the idea that you would use computers for anything, but scientific calculation and business data processing was science fiction. He could not make any headway with universities or with companies like Hewlett Packard in the early 1960s and he decided that people did not have a conceptual framework for understanding that computers could extend the power to think and communicate. So he wrote a paper, if you haven't read it, highly recommended it called Augmenting Human Intellect. Again, you know, the internet wouldn't have existed if it was up to the telephone company or the Defense Department or the computer companies alone.
It required some wild characters like Engelbart and Alan Kay and Ivan Sutherland and many others. One of the tools for themselves was the Defense Department getting freaked out by Sputnik, putting money into research into things that they hadn't thought about before. It was venture capital coming in and figuring out that you can make a lot of money by making bets on these things. None of these players would have actively collaborated if it hadn't been for this kind of accidental convergence.
So I think it pays to be humble about where technology is going. People shape it by the way, they use it. So now we're at the very start of large language models and just like at the start of personal computers and the start of the internet, we have ideas about where it will go. I think it's important that we learn from these previous episodes and understand that it is inevitably going to go in ways that we have not thought about.
And maybe we want to scan for those signals and try to encourage the more beneficial ones and protect against the less beneficial ones. So getting over the fact that I feel like I'm asking you this in question over and over, I think we've refined this down to a scalpel edge here. I think when you talk about Engelbart and Ivan Sutherland and Ivan at the University of Utah, being the professor of like Ed Catmull and John Lasseter go off and start Pixar and it's not just military industrial and science and all this, but they're part of the story of computing and also this sort of breakdown between the physical and the virtual in the sense of our increasing capacity for compelling simulacra. Part of that story is the story of Pixar and ILM and Lucasfilm and all of these amazing organizations and in the case studies I've done on innovation and organizational structure and process, they stand apart as the domains in which technology is recognized as a means rather than an end as the instrument through which we are going to tell a story through which we are going to have fun.
And so really I think all of this kind of boils down to maybe this question of how do we remind people and how do we remind our institutions how to have fun. You can say do art, but often people that are embedded in very intense, demanding, high productivity environments, steep competition, these like red queen arms races that we seem to have gotten ourselves into. There's something about like the wartime footing from which the modern computing era emerged that basically demanded that people tolerate weird people like Alan Turing who could think differently and there's a switch here that happens where we become less serious and I'm curious in closing what do you see as the most hopeful space of potentials for inspiring anxious institutions to become more playful in their approach. Well, you know when I started using social media and learning colleges, I asked around the center and I asked the head of the Institute for Innovations and Learning, why do others not use social media and learning and I was told well that's easy, this is a knowledge factor and you're hired because of your patent or your paper and if you're supposed to teach students and you don't, that's a problem but there aren't really any incentives for innovating and pedagogy.
So I decided that I was not the person to try to change the institution but I could help by finding the innovators and empowering them and connecting them. Now I ended up working with the Digital Media and Learning efforts to create what we call a connected learning community. So I have faith in a lot of the people out there who are flying under the radar and they are doing cool things. The number one thing is called ungrading.
Grading is the obstacle to learning, higher learning. I won't get into detail about that but I'll say I had groups in my class who were using online media to collaborate on projects and make collaborative projects. At one class they came in and I had a big stack of newspapers and some scissors and I said each collaborative group I want you to get together, make the tallest thing you can make out of newspaper using only scissors. And of course you know they're competitive about it but they had to collaborate in order to do it, they didn't involve their particular project.
So I think you know with a little bit of ingenuity and a little bit of thinking out of the box, let your students play, let your kids play. You don't have to teach them. Play is something that you can watch, lion cubs do it. It's the way young things learn and I think this is one of the few easy answers is that just stop restraining play so much and recognize it's important in learning.
Fun is important. Fun is not just frivolous. Yeah, agreed. On that note before we go can you name other people that you think would be fun to include in this series, people you think ought to be on record?
Well Joe Henrich will be interesting to a cultural evolution person about the state of technology and where it's going. I forget her name but there's a woman wrote about the extended mind which is very interesting, it's about how much of our thought is outside of our brain. Annie Murphy Paul. Annie Murphy Paul.
Yeah. I would talk to Brian Alexander about learning and technology. Probably I'll think of five other names after we hang out. Oh yeah, I think that's it.
Do talk to Athena activists, AKT-I-B-I-S. She has the apocalypse roadshow right now but she also heads an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and she studies cancer as uncooperative cells. Oh perfect. That's fantastic.
Yeah. I'm not sure if I can take the time and it's been an honor. Thanks a lot. Nice pleasure.
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Next week we will go deep into the overlords in a soulful discussion with acclaimed strategic and futureists and pattern navigator, Adder Paris, fellow cyborg shamanist and founder of the present's lab. Until then, take care and remember, tension is our greatest natural resource.