As one of the first visionaries in Silicon Valley, you saw the initial promise the internet held.  Two decades later, how has the internet transformed our lives for the better?

The answer is different in different parts of the world.  In the industrialized world, the rise of the Web has happily demonstrated that vast numbers of people are interested in being expressive to each other and the world at large.  This is something that I and my colleagues used to boldly predict, but we were often shouted down, as the mainstream opinion during the age of television’s dominance was that people were mostly passive consumers who could not be expected to express themselves.  In the developing world, the Internet, along with mobile phones, has had an even more dramatic effect, empowering vast classes of people in new ways by allowing them to coordinate with each other.  That has been a very good thing for the most part, though it has also enabled militants and other bad actors.

You argue the web isn’t living up to its initial promise.  How has the internet transformed our lives for the worse?

The problem is not inherent in the Internet or the Web.  Deterioration only began around the turn of the century with the rise of so-called “Web 2.0” designs.  These designs valued the information content of the web over individuals.  It became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data.  There are so many things wrong with this that it takes a whole book to summarize them.  Here’s just one problem:  It screws the middle class.  Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor.  This is why newspapers are dying.  It might sound like it is only a problem for creative people, like musicians or writers, but eventually it will be a problem for everyone.  When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming those robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today’s recording musicians?  Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.

You say that we’ve devalued intellectual achievement.  How?

On one level, the Internet has become anti-intellectual because Web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice.  It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days, because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, and that will typically be the collective expression of the Wikipedia.  Or, if the issue is contentious, people will congregate into partisan online bubbles in which their views are reinforced.  I don’t think a collective voice can be effective for many topics, such as history- and neither can a partisan mob.   Collectives have a power to distort history in a way that damages minority viewpoints and calcifies the art of interpretation.  Only the quirkiness of considered individual expression can cut through the nonsense of mob- and that is the reason intellectual activity is important.

On another level, when someone does try to be expressive in a collective, Web 2.0 context, she must prioritize standing out from the crowd.  To do anything else is to be invisible.  Therefore, people become artificially caustic, flattering, or otherwise manipulative. 

Web 2.0 adherents might respond to these objections by claiming that I have confused individual expression with intellectual achievement.  This is where we find our greatest point of disagreement.  I am amazed by the power of the collective to enthrall people to the point of blindness.  Collectivists adore a computer operating system called LINUX, for instance, but it is really only one example of a descendant of a 1970s technology called UNIX.  If it weren’t produced by a collective, there would be nothing remarkable about it at all. 

Meanwhile, the truly remarkable designs that couldn’t have existed 30 years ago, like the iPhone, all come out of “closed” shops where individuals create something and polish it before it is released to the public.  Collectivists confuse ideology with achievement. 

Why has the idea that “the content wants to be free” (and the unrelenting embrace of the concept) been such a setback?  What dangers do you see this leading to?

The original turn of phrase was “Information wants to be free.”  And the problem with that is that it anthropomorphizes information.  Information doesn’t deserve to be free.  It is an abstract tool; a useful fantasy, a nothing.  It is non-existent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way.  What we have done in the last decade is give information more rights than are given to people.  If you express yourself on the internet, what you say will be copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme.  However, the information, the abstraction, that represents you is protected within that fortress and is absolutely sacrosanct, the new holy of holies.  You never see it and are not allowed to touch it.  This is exactly the wrong set of values.

The idea that information is alive in its own right is a metaphysical claim made by people who hope to become immortal by being uploaded into a computer someday.  It is part of what should be understood as a new religion.  That might sound like an extreme claim, but go visit any computer science lab and you’ll find books about “the Singularity,” which is the supposed future event when the blessed uploading is to take place.  A weird cult in the world of technology has done damage to culture at large.

So individuals aren’t making money on their own work – but someone is.  Who generally profits from the content that the collective creates for free?

The only business model for aggregated or collectivized information- information that isn’t bought and sold directly- is the routing of advertising.  Everything but advertising becomes free.  It isn’t the advertisers who become rich in the long term, because there are fewer and fewer things to be sold, other than ads.  It is the owner of the ad exchange that becomes rich.  At the moment this means Google for most purposes, though in the financial sphere there are other parties playing an analogous role.  (I should say that I personally know the Google folks, and like them.  They didn’t have an evil plan- but they did find themselves in a niche that is problematic.)

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.  The body starts consuming itself.  That is what we are doing online.  As more and more human activity is aggregated, people huddle around the last remaining oases of revenue.  Musicians today might still be able to get paid to make music for video games, for instance, because games are still played in closed consoles and haven’t been collectivized as yet. 

As I stated above, as technology improves, and robots can do more and more things, the whole economy becomes more and more a cultural activity.  Therefore, what we do to our culture today is what we do to our whole economy, and civilization, someday soon. 

You talk about the inherent dangers in cloud computing – what exactly is it, and why is it so problematic?

Cloud computing as a technology is not the problem.  It is, in fact, an essential resource for mankind.  Let me point out, for instance, that without global cloud computing to gather and analyze data, a global phenomenon like Global Warming could not be understood, or even properly detected.  Only its local effects would be observed.

What IS a huge problem is the use of cloud computing to support the fantasy that information is alive in its own right, and that the activities or expressions of individual people are nothing but one form of computing resource, targeted for aggregation.  This is, unfortunately, an approximate statement of the latest ideology that has taken hold of the cloud.

How did cloud computing contribute to the financial crises in 2008?

Money is a form of information- the oldest form.  The combination of money and cloud computing has yet to be sorted out in a way that can allow capitalism to function in the long term.  Hedge funds and the like are essentially mirrors of Google that search for money instead of advertising opportunities.  And they find it.  The financial services industry expanded vastly when cloud computing became available in the last decade, and provided no improved service in return.  (The service provided by that sector is supposed to be risk management and what can one say?) 

The core issue is that when someone owns a key node of the network through which everyone’s information flows, the position is so advantageous that it undermines the very notion of an economy.  It is like owning everyone’s blood. 

In YOU ARE NOT A GADGET, you argue that the idea that the collective is smarter than the individual is wrong.  Why is this? 

There are some cases where a group of people can do a better job of solving certain kinds of problems than individuals. One example is setting a price in a marketplace.  Another example is an election process to choose a politician.  All such examples involve what can be called optimization, where the concerns of many individuals are reconciled. 

There are other cases that involve creativity and imagination.  A crowd process generally fails in these cases.  The phrase “Design by Committee” is treated as derogatory for good reason.  That is why a collective of programmers can copy UNIX but cannot invent the iPhone.

In the book, I go into considerably more detail about the differences between the two types of problem solving.  Creativity requires periodic, temporary “encapsulation” as opposed to the kind of constant global openness suggested by the slogan “Information wants to be free.”  Biological cells have walls, academics employ temporary secrecy before they publish, and real authors with real voices might want to polish a text before releasing it.  In all these cases, encapsulation is what allows for the possibility of testing and feedback that enables a quest for excellence.  To be constantly diffused in a global mush is to embrace mundanity.

You say you love the internet and are part of the “loyal opposition” within the industry you’re criticizing; you even currently work with Microsoft.   So what’s the way forward?  If you could re-route the metaphorical boat, where would you point it?

The architecture of the internet must support a global, universal micropayments capability.  In this way, anyone could charge for information made available online, whether it is music or a program for a future robot.  A silly YouTube-like prank might generate a windfall for a silly teenager, while a scholar’s writing might be only occasionally accessed, but over a long period might still generate enough income to be of use.  People could then re-create the best social formula that has been achieved thus far in human experience.  Middle class people could own something- the information they produce- that would give them sustenance as they have children and age. 

In order for this scheme to work, there would have to be some structural changes introduced gradually, as I explain in the book.  This direction is the only way to create a human-centric internet, instead of one that serves the cultists who believe in information more than people.  It would not attempt to make information free, but instead make it affordable.  It is worth noting that this is exactly how the web would have developed if the initial design proposal for it, dating back to the 1960s, had been carried out.  (This was Ted Nelson’s vision.)  It is the obvious way to design the network if people are your top priority.