On Saturday 17th October 2009, The Brighton Salon and the Battle of Ideas teamed up at the Thistle Hotel in Brighton to argue about the implications of online collaboration and internet sharing for our social life and the future of society with a stellar panel featuring: Science fiction writer, author and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow; the world’s leading expert on the use of mobile sound technologies, Dr Michael Bull of the University of Sussex; and Nico Macdonald, author, What is Web Design?, consultant and chair of the Media Futures Conference. Keeping them in line for the event was Dr Robert Clowes, a philosopher of cognition and technology from the University of Sussex, Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, and author, Being Human in the Age of Facebook (forthcoming).

Before the audience got the chance to grill the panel, each gave a short introduction:

Cory Doctorow

As a science fiction writer, Cory said he did not make predictions about the future. Really, it was about trying to predict the present. The internet is the world’s greatest copying machine but that is not all it can do. What it can do is about to get weird.

From now on copying gets easier but the internet’s best trick is that it can be a collaboration machine. There are many examples of the collaboration it can provide. During the riots in Myanmar, protesters rising against oppression were being brutally put down in the street and the people were capturing images of this. But the authorities did not cut off the internet and phone networks. Why? Because Myanmar relies on Shell Oil and that company needs the internet to stay up. “Shell is an IT company that also moves oil around,” said Cory.

In the last days of Communist Moldova, when demonstrators took to the streets, the authorities cut the phone network but the protesters just ran into Macdonald’s to use its free wireless. The authorities again would not interfere with Macdonald’s - “Which is an IT company that also sells hamburgers!” added Cory.

Consider Wikipedia; imagine what it would have taken to build it from scratch. Consider what it would be like to build it without the internet – there would have been filing cabinets being moved around the world between people’s homes. Or consider Linux and how that would be built without the internet. If that operating system was a skyscraper you would have to acquire a patch of ground and invite people to bring along steel and concrete and everything else. With the internet, people can collaborate to produce a world class operating system. Collaboration has also brought us the advantages of Google over the old Yahoo system for searching, changing the shape of the internet.

There are many kinds of collaboration on the internet and a lot of it is not worth considering but some of it is very interesting indeed and shows the potential to create new things that we had never expected. The future is weird. Imagine the whole thing like a forest where, once you have cut back the canopy of the trees a little, interesting and new things can grow out of the humus on the forest floor.

Michael Bull

After the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1990 and the collapse of Communism we were left with the sense that there was nothing else but capitalism. The collaboration by people in the new media is almost like that in the sense that it seems that this is all there is. Michael wants to question that.

When we connect to each other through new media how does that relate to our face-to-face connections, for example? In the 1950s people in Wales were studied on how they used the telephone. They liked that they could speak to their aunty when she is in Glasgow, for example, but the telephone was no use to them when they needed a babysitter.

A UNESCO report into how children used communication technologies found that the time spent with these devices was inversely proportional to the sense of well being that the children enjoyed. The more they used such technology the less it appeared that they could trust their associates. This may be very important when considering the creation of communities, both virtual and in real life.

While we are using our machines to communicate, we are entering a sort of virtual public space that allows very specific kinds of relations with other people. Our embodied experiences take place within the space of the internet and we construct our ideas of ourselves based on those experiences.

How do we manage to spend 27 hours a day on media? The activities that we do at the same time, such as talking on the phone at the same time as we are watching TV, can be added together and totalised. The construction of a sense of community in the virtual world creates a specific idea of the individual and the way that a person relates to other people. People within social organisations are forced to spend time apart from the ones they want to be with, their families and friends, so they want to connect with them. People don’t choose to be on their own but they are actually experiencing isolation through their connectivity.

The problem at the heart of the discussion of communication is that we are becoming more and more isolated and, at the same time, we desire more connectivity to overcome this. Looking at how children connect and how they use phones, it seems that our further connectivity by communication in one sense is driving our greater isolation in another sense. Within our communities, we collaborate more to create our communities but, increasingly, we remain existentially alone together.

Nico Macdonald

The internet developed, as Cory described, from open source beginnings. A system of collaboration has been created that allows people to work together in ways that would have been impossible before. There is something very profound going on here but the way that open source is considered is slightly worrying. We can do an injustice to the potential for collaboration in terms of the profundity of its possibilities.

Most people still mainly live in a world of things – we all had to walk or ride cars or trains to get here – but the internet affects people in the media much more than others. As a former journalist, Nico has seen tremendous changes in that industry; it has gone from people laying out hot metal type, reading it backwards and pressing paper on it to become the digital publishing industry of today.

The extent to which internet has expanded knowledge and changed the way we consume is talked up by people in the media. The West Coast counter culture people also talk up the amount of change that has occurred and present open source as a kind of social transformation.

Much of the open source work that is done is by people who should be doing their real jobs or going out and socialising instead. We do not want to do the jobs we’re paid to do and there’s a tendency in social consumption to self-actualise through sharing.

The models of sharing can produce some products, such as Apache, that are aimed at professionals and almost impossible to use for most people without an expensive addition.

Invention has taken place, but open source models are much better suited to some things than to others. "The 24-hour novel, for example, has not reinvented the form of the novel; it's just like any novel - except that it may have more writers than readers." Often open source models may not actually encourage the invention of something new, but the replication of something that already exists.

The discussion:

Among the questions and points the audience raised were:

Big companies contribute a great deal to open source, improving designs and making their improvements available to everyone. Students live in our wired world with all kinds of media but they have to leave that behind when in the classroom – why?

Students can contribute to how learning occurs and also how teaching occurs.

It’s very easy for a small thing to become a very big thing over the internet because the whole world may become involved – there’s no closed society.

How can Michael say that connection has made us more isolated when someone who sent their son to sea in the 1800s might not hear from them for months?

If we want to see progress through technology, we are going to need more standards of all kinds to enhance collaborative efforts.

In Warsaw, after the fall of communism, some people missed things like the big boiler that was connected to everyone’s house when it was replaced by individual boilers and their problems.

Rob Clowes, the chair, threw out the point that it takes about 200 countries and thousands of people to make something like a phone – so what’s new about this collaboration?

And, most aptly of all considering the subject of the meeting, someone asked: “So what is the future of collaboration?”

Cory Doctorow returned to the 24-hour novel. The journey and process of making it had been the most important thing about that project, rather than the result, the book that was written: “It’s like judging a sex act by what’s left behind on the sheets!” He sited policy makers who would, for example, try to find the everlasting fix to the problems of the record industry. This is pointless because everything is moving much faster than before. “We are in a period of permanent technological revolution,” he said.

Rob asked if the question about education could be broadened out to: “How can we integrate the changes the internet has brought with the rest of society?”

Cory said that he had used Wikipedia all the time when teaching students, making them read it and modify its entries. Although it did make it much harder to grade their efforts, it produced better pedagogy.

Michael Bull said that the Czech dissidents of the Soviet era had smuggled their ideas and books about at the risk of arrest, but that upon the country becoming more like ours it had become depoliticised – much like the students in Britain. The sense of social criticism has been lost and everything about life has become commoditised in their easy lives: “What would you want them to subvert?” he asked. Stepping off the train and phoning home connects us with family and friends, but also highlights that we are isolated from those we want to be with.

When lectures at Sussex University are recorded, attendance drops by 20% and there is little evidence that students ever watch the pod casts. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” Michael said.

Nico Macdonald said that open source models often have more select groups of people directing the work of others. Collaboration between the many that contribute to a project is not inventive in and of itself. Revolution can be an overused word, especially when applied merely to business models. “The development of capitalism and the growth of wage labour as people came off the land is a much more profound change,” he said. Revolutions in the past had come about by adapting to changes.

Nico was sympathetic to the point about standards – we haven’t even got calendars that integrate with each other after all the software development over many years!

One might hope for society 2.0, but we have not yet mastered the web 1.0 in terms of the potential for collaboration. What is needed is a vision of the future so that some sort of consensus on coming together for change can be found. “The future of collaboration is outside of collaboration. You have to decide what you want to collaborate about” Nico said.

Further contributions from the floor:

It’s not true what Michael says about isolation of technology. Lots of people around here get together in social places as a result of the internet.

The technology will help us through the storm of information we face in our lives.

I raised the potential for the further eradication of the public sphere as journalism itself sank with its business platforms in the old media.

People voluntarily contribute to open source projects and they like to share their work; it’s not like they have to contribute.

Cory said that a major factor in our western economies was that we had dismantled all our industry and shipped it out to the East. Change today is so fast that it is silly to compare it now with any time in the past, when change in society took place in relative slow-motion. He felt that the technology he used personally every day to help organise his life was an incredible help to him. He always knew what was going on the personal assistance of the devices he used offered a palimpsest for living his life.

Michael pointed out that Brighton was a fairly specific kind of technologically aware community but that we could still be isolated in the crowd. In Britain, we had a wealthy economy but nonetheless “many people are going to be excluded from all this stuff”. He gave the example of the man who kept a diary of every day of his life, but that the diary gave him time for little else and would be full of entries about writing in the diary… Real sportspeople don’t use Nike’s built-in pedometers because they are in touch with their own bodies to a greater extent.

Nico said that people certainly volunteered to take part in open source projects, of course, but that most of the people in the world were pretty stuck with the hierarchies that they are given in life. A lot of open source material was still made by techies and aimed at techies’ home use. The challenge of making things that real people can use was something that was rarely taken up – that’s why people pay for stuff so they can use it properly. Nico felt the new public sphere we had created might be giving way to series of small, disconnected circles. He said Cory had talked about not building the social problem into the technology, but the social problem is actually how we do that.

The wisdom of the crowd:

Science fiction writers do predict the future, actually; what about that weird future, Cory? “Where’s my spangly suit?” How weird will the future get?

I work in IT and we’re building a system for a client. They want it to feel just like a Mac – why don’t they want us to make it better?

There’s a new kind of banking system in Africa that allows very poor people in villages to club together to buy things they can all use – that’s collaboration.

It’s a requirement of all sorts of colleges and other places that they use Microsoft Office, but there’s an open source version of Office that can work with it so that you don’t have to pay for it if you don’t want to.

Humans have not changed much psychologically; we have just created systems to make things easier.

People have always collaborated and we collaborate on everything, but leadership is essential to any kind of collaborative venture or it will not be successful.

The internet is not just a means of information; it’s also a method of social control. It’s a “kaleidoscopic distraction machine” every bit as controlling as mortgages.

Governments are starting to open up their data and New York has held an “open hack” day.

Summing up; the panellists’ final words:

Nico: Why does the client want an interface just like a Mac? We’re still grappling with that question and it may be that the rise of the shareholder in the corporate world has discouraged development – it may be safer not to invent.

My dad worked for the Inner London Education Authority and he put a VCR in every school, but his emphasis was on what he was teaching. The National Curriculum is a joke; it tells you what to think not how to think. Sharing free knowledge is a fantastic thing but teaching remains a labour intensive activity. You can say not what will happen but you can say when it will happen and how.

You can predict that it’s going to be fantastic but that all depends on us. I’m interested in what we do as a society and in how ambitious and humanistic we are when we use this technology. It can draw together contributions of the talents of the whole of humanity. While very excited about the possibilities of open source and people’s desire to design, we must be a bit down to earth or we will undermine the potential of this technology before they have got going.

Michael: Virtual reality machines have become silly – they look stupid now because our idea of the future changes. The African example shows that phones are not useful there because you cannot put masts up everywhere, but the new technology shows that people can come to repossess certain things. The whole village might watch the one TV in the square or 100 people might use the PC – our model of bedroom use of these things is very culturally specific.

I’m more pessimistic; we’re living in the worst recession. We’re staying in the Hotel Abyss, looking over the edge, but it could be that the technology will actually help.

Cory: Asimov didn’t predict the future but the present. During the New Deal there were people in lab coats planning everything, hence the Foundation series features people in lab coats planning people’s history.

Heinlein only predicted the waterbed – he was wrong about everything else. Even the inventors can get what their technology will be used for very wrong. Honeywell thought that housewives would use the personal computer for recipes. The first telephone company tried to demonstrate its use by having a phone to transmit opera! The problem for science fiction writers has been to consider that. I have to go much further.

I’m happy with the data that’s stored by me for me, but I don’t want anybody else taking my data and using it for other reasons.

We want to collaborate; we’re monkeys who do things together so that we have more time to do other stuff.

To illustrate how weird the future might get, consider that, because Henry Ford sold everyone cars and we built roads, everybody now carries a government issued piece of paper in the form of a licence. No one could have predicted that at the time.

Afterward, we took the future of collaboration to the bar.

Sean Bell

The Brighton Salon and the Institute of Ideas organised this event as a satellite of the Battle of Ideas Festival. We would like to thank the Institute of Ideas for helping Rob to produce the event, our panellists for facilitating a fantastic discussion and our hosts at the Thistle Hotel. The Battle of Ideas is a weekend festival of forthright debate and discussion at The Royal College of Art on October 31 and November 1. For tickets and information: www.battleofideas.org.uk

Cory Doctorow will be taking part in the session Rethinking Privacy in an age of Disclosure and Sharing at 1.30pm on Saturday October 31.

(Sean Bell has written a Battle in Print piece, Rethinking Privacy, for this session, which you can read at the above URL – click on Battles in Print).

Robert Clowes will chair the session Green New Deal to the Rescue? at 12.30 pm on Sunday November 1.

Dan Travis, the director of the Brighton Salon, will be speaking at the session Sporty Kids and Pushy Parents: How much encouragement is too much? at 5.30pm on Sunday November 1.

This has been a personal report of the event by Sean Bell of the Brighton Salon. Much of the lively debate has been edited, especially some of the more technical aspects. To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, this is because The Brighton Salon is not an IT company that also does live discussion and debate. If you want to report any errors, omissions impossible or make clarifications, contact me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it