“Big Brother” versus “Little Brother”: Two Possible Media Futures

A Second Life creator is fighting to give digital pioneers room and freedom to grow.
By Cory Ondrejka

We live in the future.

I am writing on a three-pound sliver of a laptop that can execute billions of operations every second, connected to the Internet over a mobile broadband connection. I am juggling competing deadlines for this article and writing Web code for a project running on a cloud infrastructure I will never see. I send e-mail, listen to music, publish updates to Twitter and Facebook, and test machine-learning algorithms, all while enjoying a double espresso.

When I run into a bug or can’t remember the syntax for a command, I Google the question, knowing the Web’s answers to be faster and more accurate than thedocumentation stored on my hard drive and Kindle. My phone is a pocket computer with nearly the power of the first desktop machines used in Second Life’s development. All of us can find, manage, remix, and share information with an ease we are already taking for granted.

We live in the future. Big Content does not. Big Content — shorthand for the publishing, music, movie, television, and news industries and their powerful lobbying organizations — is staggering into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Despite the largest, wealthiest, and most connected global audience in human history, Big Content faces precipitous declines in sales and advertising revenue.

Because Big Content does not embrace the world we live in, two wildly different outcomes exist for media in 2020: Big Brother or Little Brother. Which future we get is a function of who participates in and drives the ongoing debates around media, innovation, copyright, piracy, and Internet access.

Content owners have railed against technological change since before Big Content even existed, from John Philip Sousa’s denouncing of the player piano to former Motion Picture Association of America chief Jack Valenti’s famous comparison of the VCR to the Boston Strangler. But for the most part, national governments have acted to maximize growth and prosperity through a balanced approach to intellectual property law. History validated that approach, with content creators and owners repeatedly adapting to and mastering new technologies and business opportunities.

The massive advantages that Big Content has when leveraging new technology — existing audience, established talent, and institutional expertise — are not enough for the incumbents. Instead, Big Content wants regulation to control technology, to force the law to define what artists and fans want in the future. As laughably bad as our ability to regulate the future is, it is fortunate that previous attempts, focused on limiting what artists and fans could do with their content through digital rights management (DRM), met with limited success at best.

Recently, Big Content has changed tactics, determined to create a Big Brother future for us all. At the heart of this new approach is the idea of “graduated response,” embodied in France’s recently ratified “three strikes” law. “Three strikes” is fairly simple: Be accused of violating copyright law three times, and you lose access to the Internet for three months to one year. A mysterious official body, the High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet, or HADOPI, would enforce the measure in accordance with a broad mandate to “prevent the hemorrhaging of cultural works on the Internet.”

This bears repeating: If HADOPI accuses you of violating copyright law three times, you could lose your access to the Internet.

“Three strikes” is gaining support worldwide. Today, most of the developed world is engaged in negotiations around the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The parties to the agreement, including the United States, the European Union, and South Korea, have kept negotiations secret, but leaks indicate “three strikes” is under consideration.

This is akin to having your phone service terminated for making a mix tape. Or your electricity turned off for wearing a homemade superhero Halloween costume.

This is the Big Brother future. Abuses of the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act have already shown that content owners will allege copyright abuse to hamper business competitors, suppress free speech, and block innovation. How much more powerful a hammer is “three strikes,” since it can effectively cut off the accused from their community, co-workers, and family by blocking Internet access? For many people, such a move would destroy their livelihood.

Thus, a bleak media future for 2020 is on the horizon, one where any content owner is able to invoke Big Brother to cut off your access to the Internet. Use the Internet as your phone service, for playing games, watching television, paying your bills, attending school, or working from home? Too bad! Three alleged copyright violations and you are back in 1990. Three mistakes by notoriously error-prone filtering software, and you are a second-class citizen, blocked from interacting with the rest of civil society.

What will this lead to? In 2020, the Internet and World Wide Web will be the most important technology any of us have access to. Fearing the loss of that connection, you will take the only option available and avoid media on the Internet entirely. No posting pictures, no streaming content, no cloud storage of your data, no user-generated content, no discussion groups about media. Any of these uses of media could lead to inadvertent copyright infringement or false positives, resulting in the loss of your connection to the Internet and the Web. So, ironically, by driving a Big Brother agenda, Big Content is sowing the seeds for its own destruction by eliminating the largest and most easily addressable audience ever.

Alternatives to Big Brother and Big Content

Fortunately, Big Brother is not the only option. We — innovators, politicians, and citizens — can demand a better option: a Little Brother future.

Among the changes brought on by the Internet age, one of the greatest is the tremendous increase in capability available to individuals and small teams. First, the dramatic decrease in computation, storage, and transmission costs makes it far less risky to experiment with new technology. Next, the explosion of wired and wireless connections to the Web ensures an addressable audience. Finally, intense competition between tools and technologies makes Web development faster and more approachable. It has never been cheaper or easier to create content or to find and deliver that content to the right audience.

In broader terms, the costs of communication and learning have never been lower, and will only drop further if we refuse to allow Big Content to drive the debate. Cheaper learning should matter to all of us, because innovation is constrained by the cost of learning. Innovation — turning knowledge into products — drives per capita economic growth through productivity gains, so any nation that fundamentally reduces the costs of learning has a global competitive advantage. History is replete with examples, most recently the United States’ productivity gains in the 1990s due to the expansion of the Internet and information technology.

In 2010, as the world pulls out of a dramatic economic downturn, we are on the cusp of a new period of innovation and growth, driven by wireless broadband, mobile devices, and ubiquitous connectivity. Rather than succumbing to Big Brother policy demands, citizens should rally for a Little Brother future, where everyone has the maximum chance to create the next Google, Facebook, or Twitter. A Little Brother future relies on net neutrality (unrestricted movement of data) and a reasonable balance between the rights of content owners and music, movie, and content fans.

This is the future where artists and audiences have the best chance to find each other and create the next great ideas for Big Content. New media companies and business strategies can only emerge if the regulatory framework enables experimentation. Recent examples abound. EMI Music led first with non-digitally rights-managed music and a focus on the music experience; the company announced a significant upturn in revenues. YouTube was able to launch and grow while the courts worked on the legal questions related to hosting user-uploaded videos. Trent Reznor, founder of the rock band Nine Inch Nails, works with fans to create new media projects. Second Life’s users created successful virtual venues for live music. A Little Brother future ensures that innovators continue to have the space to try.

As the last decade has taught us, they will try and try! And TRY! This doesn’t guarantee Big Content’s ongoing success, but when compared with a Big Brother future where their demise is guaranteed, the choice is obvious. Big Content should be joining the rest of us as we lead the charge for a Little Brother future.

About the Author

Cory Ondrejka is the former executive vice president of digital marketing for EMI Music and the co-creator of Second Life. He’s also an entrepreneur, speaker, advisor, and a nonresident fellow at the Network Culture Project at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He can be reached at cory.ondrejka(at)gmail.com. Blog: http://ondrejka.net

Note: The choice of “Little Brother” was inspired by the novel of the same name by Cory Doctorow, which examines life in today’s Big Brother world.

Reinventing the Luddite: An Interview with Andrew Keen

An Internet entrepreneur and Web critic is trying to remake the Internet from within.

The following interview was conducted by FUTURIST senior editor Patrick Tucker.

THE FUTURIST: You’re perhaps the most outspoken critic of Web 2.0 and Internet culture to participate in Internet culture. You’ve railed against Twitter and Facebook even though you subscribe to both. What do you see as your mission?

Andrew Keen: I’m ambivalent about Facebook and Twitter and almost all of these things. But as a speaker and a social critic, I have an economic incentive in finding an audience. As mainstream media cracks up, the only way to build a brand successfully is to use a service like Twitter. That’s not to say that tweets in themselves have intrinsic value or will ever have intrinsic value. You’ll never be able to sell a tweet, no matter how beautifully crafted. I don’t have to admire or improve what’s happening, but I can’t be a Luddite, either. The people in the nineteenth century who refused to acknowledge the significance of the Industrial Revolution were swept away.

THE FUTURIST:You’ve been very vocal about how today’s Internet culture erodes privacy. Do you envision a future in which privacy neither exists nor is particularly missed? If so, what does someone with no conception of privacy behave like? What is the culture like?

Keen:I do envision such a possibility. In a culture with no concept of privacy, there wouldn’t be an inner life. Nothing would be kept to ourselves. We would lifestream 24 hours a day. The John Stuart Mill idea of the good life, with a clear delineation between inner and outer life, is turned on its head. I hope we never see it.

But you can already sense the way the Internet and artificial intelligence are tearing down the notion that we should have a distinction between public and private. I’m terribly hesitant about terminology like “transparency,” which suggests that businesses, institutions, even professionals, should try to put as much of themselves online as they can to reassure the public about their activities. This portrays that shift as something good, as more evolved. What does this lead to? Perhaps a culture of constant self-arrest, where we’re afraid to do anything because of how it may appear to others. Perhaps we’ll live vicariously through our AI entities.

THE FUTURIST: You’ve compared the Internet revolution to rock ’n’ roll, but it seems that the Internet revolution has the potential to be more hopeful. After all, rock ’n’ roll coincided with the rise of Jacques Derida and the deconstructionist philosophical movement. Many argue that the appeal of rock ‘n’ roll was the way it presented a violent teardown of prior musical forms. The Internet, by definition, is about construction, building the future. How exactly is the Internet like rock ‘n’ roll?

Keen:The Internet is more closely related to the rock ’n’ roll culture of the Sixties rather than of the Fifties. Richard Florida, who wrote Rise of the Creative Class, has talked about this. He makes a good point that the Internet, technologically, rose from the military-industrial complex of the Fifties, but the culture of it is better represented by the counterculture of the Sixties. It’s not that the Internet is like the Sixties; it is the Sixties.

The primary difference is that rock ’n’ roll generated a lot of money for certain types of people — namely, record companies and artists. The heroes of the Sixties were the rock stars and the counterculturalists. Many of them were obsessed with a childish revolt against authority, but some of them were remarkable. The wealth that’s been created out of the Internet revolution has been monopolized by technologists. The heroes of this age are entrepreneurs like the Google boys rather than the creative artists who have been relatively ignored for the most part.

The ultimate irony is that the artists were the radicals in the Sixties. In the Internet age, they’ve been rendered conservatives. Look at what happens to singers who try to defend intellectual property rights and the vitriol of the attacks to which they’re subjected?

Similarly, nothing of much intellectual or cultural value has come out of the Internet as an artistic medium. Intellectuals are able to use it peddle their own brands and ideas, but I’ve seen little Internet-based art with any lasting value. There haven’t been any real Internet movies; there hasn’t been a truly affecting Internet novel, though many have tried; Internet music has been basically a failure. Even when it’s successful, it isn’t created on the Internet, it’s just distributed on the Internet. Google, for example, is a remarkable company built by two computer scientists. Has it contributed to culture? At best, Google has undermined traditional media and destroyed it, and in so doing, it’s destroyed the way artists make money and the way experts make their livelihoods.

What does this mean for us now? The crusty old academic in a chair with a pipe reading books and giving lectures won’t work in the twenty-first century, but I don’t believe expertise will be swept away. I hope it will be modernized. Today’s expert needs to learn how to ride the wave, which requires not only wisdom, but speed.

THE FUTURIST:Watching these trends over the last few years, have you grown more optimistic or more pessimistic?

Keen:I’m more optimistic than I was when I wrote Cult of the Amateur, which was published in 2007 (St. Martin’s). People have begun to realize that Wikipedia isn’t reliable, that most of the stuff on YouTube has no value, that a tweet, by definition, cannot be wise. My hope is that by 2020 experts will be able to flood back into the production of culture. A legal scholar can tweet as well as a 12-year-old. It’s not the technology that undermines the expertise; it’s a cultural disrespect for authority and even for learning.

But culture is changing. We’ll require new experts to help us understand how that’s happened and what it means, particularly for education. Hopefully, people who are smart and well educated, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, will seize back the tools of production and realize that they can have quite an impact by distributing their wisdom.

About the interviewee

Andrew Keen is an author and Internet critic and the author of Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing Our Culture (St. Martin’s, 2007). As an Internet entrepreneur, he founded the music site Audiocafe.com in 1995. His second book, Digital Vertigo: Anxiety, Loneliness and Inequality in the Social Media Age, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2010.

Finding Faith in Humankind

A humanist is spreading the gospel of godlessness, respectfully.
By Roy Speckhardt

A modern look at religion and spirituality yields a mix of potentialities. On the one hand, there’s testimony and evidence that religion and spirituality can benefit people. After all, there’s an obvious social and political benefit in adhering to the beliefs of the majority. And there are also indications that both psychological and physical health are stronger among the faithful. On the other hand, spiritual faith has been a source for conflict and authoritarian control. Disputes, terrorism, and war are rarely rooted solely in religious disagreement, but such conflict surely fans the flames of such conflagrations. And faith is also a tool used by those in power to retain their control. As we look to the future, we see that traditional spirituality may bring us both good and harm. But will it persist?

From Friedrich Nietzsche to H. L. Mencken to Christopher Hitchens, many who were convinced of religion’s negative impact falsely predicted its demise. Those whose worldviews are solidly built with a frame of logic upon the firm foundation of knowledge often forget that they are in the minority. Just because faith requires adherence to unproven and unprovable assertions does not mean that such ideas will be abandoned now, or even over time. Much more likely is that the human need for resolution, the tendency to hold on to what’s desired, and simple inertia will maintain spiritual faith indefinitely.

While religion and spirituality may persist, it will certainly not be as it is today in the future — not 10 years from now, and not into the more distant decades. History has shown the evolution of religion from tribal animisms and other polytheistic faiths to monotheistic ones. A few religions, including some modern schools of Buddhism, New Age worldviews, and religious philosophies, are even in the realm of “post-theological.”

One steady change we’ve seen is the lessening impact of traditional religion on richer societies. Where once religion held equal sway over political, social, and spiritual domains, we’ve seen that authority recede. Political authority is rarely granted today in the same way it was under Holy Roman emperors and the divine right of kings. Social control in the West is far less stringent than it once was, with the churches losing their hold on rules surrounding courting, marriage, and the family. Even mainline churches are seeing their domain shrinking as discoveries provide testable explanations for movements of the stars, the origins of species, and the birth of the universe. For some, these sorts of answers remove the need to rely on spirituality.

As we move into the future, one can predict where traditional spirituality will continue to lose its authority. The churches will eventually surrender their losing battles on gay marriage, on a woman’s right to choose (abortion rights), and on the maintenance of stereotyped gender roles. But it will also lose in struggles that are just beginning.

The prejudice seen commonly among the faithful today — that goodness can only come through godliness — will be less and less accepted. As more and more of the 10%–15% of the population who are atheists and agnostics come out of their closets to their friends, family, and neighbors, it will be difficult to hold to the claim that so many lack the ability to lead productive moral lives. As that breaks down, religion and spirituality will begin to lose its connection to goodness in general. No longer will it be a social liability to voice secular principles and rationalist grounding.

In a world like this, being part of secular humanist communities will be an accepted alternative to traditionally religious ones, and even preferred over increasingly irrelevant fundamentalist faiths. And fundamentalists will no longer get the support they need to impose religion in the military, the democratic process, and the public schools. When the time comes to mark marriages, funerals, and the like, evocative and inspiring humanist ceremonies will become the norm for these life events, because they address the needs of an increasingly diverse culture.

The scientific method, with its basis in observation, analysis, and experimentation, will be seen as the driving force for determining valid choices for public policy. People will understand that science is a way to seek answers, not something to “believe” in, and polls will show vast majorities accepting human evolution over creationism, supporting comprehensive sex education, and understanding how human intervention impacts our environment.

As politicians campaign for public office, the days when it was political suicide to be a humanist or an atheist will be long gone. Like Jack Kennedy’s efforts to show his political actions to be separate from the Holy See, future political leaders will go even further, trying to position their belief systems in humanistic terms, with the religious candidates pointing out that, while they believe in a higher power, they base their decisions on the here and now.

That may not all come to pass by 2020, but progress should be clearly visible. Though Christianity and other religious paths will remain, the writing will be on the wall for the end of Christian social and political dominance in the United States.

With all these changes occurring, what will the new spirituality look like? Perhaps the word spirituality will slip from usage, since it’s derived from something so debatable, but the idea of shared values and a unified vision for the future will remain.

Humanists will encourage empathy, along with the compassion and sense of inherent equal worth that flows from it, in a way that honors human knowledge about ourselves and our universe. This means applying the scientific method to our pursuit of happiness, a pursuit we recognize as not just a solitary one, but one for us to strive for as a society. When we look at the world in this way, we discover that self-improvement, doing for others, and working to improve society are the keys to deep-seated happiness.

Those ideals are consistent with many traditional morals, like integrity, fidelity, and an independent work ethic. In 2020, most people will no longer regard religious ideas as outside the realm of analysis and critique. Respect for the various gods will diminish, but respect for parents, teachers, and others who’ve accumulated knowledge should increase. Holding to sacred days and geographies will become less prevalent, but an appreciation for diverse expertise will be cultivated. The finality of death will be a challenge for many to grapple with, but fear of the unknown will be replaced with greater curiosity and an acceptance of uncertainty.

So looking to the future, 10 years from now and further down the road, we see a changing landscape for spirituality. Religious faith, with its positives and negatives, will persist. While mainstream faiths remain part of U.S. culture, traditional, and fundamentalist religious ideas will recede. As they lose their reach, rational, universal answers will come to the center stage.

About the Author

Roy Speckhardt is executive director of the American Humanist Association, where he actively promotes the humanist perspective on political issues. He serves as a board member of the Humanist Institute and the United Coalition of Reason and as an advisory board member of the Secular Student Alliance. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Nurturing the Spirit in the Age of the Web

A Buddhist teacher brings the dharma, both digitally and in person.
By Ayyā Gotamī, Dr. Rev. Prem Suksawat

What is the future of spirituality? To answer, let’s look at its recent past. Many individuals around the world, especially in the developed West, put less emphasis on spirituality and more faith in science and technology to solve their problems. They sought to break with religious authority. The last century was marked by rapid change, and this century surely will be as well. Change has an enormous effect on the human psyche — the estrangement many of us feel in the twenty-first century is only worsening, at ever-escalating rates. The tsunami of technology has done nothing to assuage the problem; indeed, it is a major force in the surge of feelings of collective alienation.

Computing technology is the most striking example. It has become an indispensable survival tool for most, yet the hardware and software often have short, costly lives in terms of both money and time. Even a nun like me is not immune to this! Especially for young people, technology can be a real addiction. Instead of doing the physical activity the human body was designed to do, many young people spend long hours in front of computers and have electric and electronic devices to replace almost all human duties.

Technology may be at the root of many of the spiritual problems related to modernity; but technology, combined with spirituality, can be part of the solution to feelings of emptiness and despair. Far from becoming obsolete, spirituality can play a larger and more important role in the lives of people around the world if spiritual teachers and leaders adapt to modern life and use technology to reach a wide audience, sustainably and with minimal cost.

However, they must also work with their students and congregations on a very personal level. Even those who do not realize it are in desperate need of compassion and human understanding, and there are times that “virtual spirituality” will not be adequate. Nothing about spirituality, in my opinion, needs to be redefined; however, it is critical that we make the right use of the new methods of communicating to ensure its usefulness to coming generations.

For example, Buddhism in the text-based Theravāda tradition is inherently rational, logical, and often scientific. The mandate to use the texts as they are and not to update them to modern circumstances provides an excellent opportunity to teach the theology while applying its lessons to present-day problems. A learned and most-likely ordained person can find sections of text, such as helpful allegories, that are applicable to almost any modern situation. Religious texts highlight what is universally true about human suffering. This is why they’ve endured and why I believe they will endure into the future. For students and young people, finding that people from thousands of years ago shared their difficulties is a great discovery and source of comfort.

Science and religion will not only coexist in the twenty-first century; they will reinforce one another. I have a mental-health background; I draw upon that knowledge to assist people who come to me for guidance and support. I also have students to whom I lecture regarding their religious studies. I draw parallels between modern mental-health practices and Buddhist teachings. In the future, most ordained individuals should expect to have some counseling function in their roles, focusing on practical, daily living in the twenty-first century (and by this I mean “counseling” strictly in the Western sense of psychological guidance; the same word is used, in some countries, to refer to superstitious and sometimes exploitative rituals).

Religious practitioners will rely on technology to reach out to more people. Many monks, nuns, and other ordained people have spread knowledge via videos, blogs, wikis, etc. Many people have switched from attending sermons at churches or temples to watching them on TV or online due to transportation and time constraints. I teach more than 200 students around the world. We take as much advantage as we can of electronic and online reference materials. I run retreats and Dhamma Talks via online chat. I have frequent phone and chat discussions with individual students.

However, I am continually surprised by the number of students who still put forth the effort and expense to visit me in person to gain real, human support. Recently, I visited the Fo Guang Shan (FGS) monastery where Ven. Hsing Yun leads a practice of Humanistic Buddhism (utilizing Buddhism to fit the needs of the present world). FGS is based in Taiwan and has branches around the world. Apparently, China, one of the greatest examples of a developing country rampantly assuming the problems of the West, has asked them to establish more temples there. This shows that people need spiritual support more and more, and they need it where they live, not just via the Internet.

I predict that more and more people will begin to visit their priests, rabbis, and pastors again because the technology will not be able to replace warm gestures from real, live human beings. While we need not update our scriptures, we must certainly update our practices to suit the real needs of people as they evolve; this means both the high-tech and the high-touch aspects. By doing this, many of them will gain a feeling of security that will allow them to make positive life changes.

About the Author

Ayyā Gotamī (Dr. Rev. Prem Suksawat) is the abbess of the Dhamma Cetiya Buddhist Vihāra, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. She founded the temple in 1997, converting her former lay residence to propagate Buddhism in the United States. Prior to her ordination, she spent 14 years as an anāgārika (“homeless monk”). Her lay career included experience in the mental-health field in public and private agencies, where she specialized in the impact of cultural differences on individuals. She uses this background to integrate Western psychology and psychiatric treatment with Buddhist teachings to help and educate her students.