Program or Be Programmed | Douglas Rushkoff | Talks at Google

I want to welcome one of my dear dear friends uh to uh to hear this is Douglas rashkov hey well thanks for having me it's a um it's a little strange because I'm I'm basically running around the country demanding uh demanding people become basically uh digitally literate so it's a it's an odd argument to make at the the center of digital literacy of the perhaps the universe but um but I'll make it anyway um and I'll make it in a way that I think is is is specific um to you all um my my main message to you guys as on the humans um you know please don't give up on on the masses on the the general Public's ability to understand what's going on um another way of saying that is don't um don't surrender um entirely to usability um just for their own for their own ease and and momentary and temporary Comfort um I think that that the opportunity cost for us as a as a civilization is really is really too great um you guys know as as as I do to a lesser extent um that that computers are essentially anything machines I mean those of us who were introduced to computers in the 70s as I was um you know we were introduced to computers with no software we didn't know what software was there was just a computer and then you would decide to make it do something so I I was introduced to this technology thinking of computers as anything machines and that experience changed the way I looked at everything else know every everything I looked at after that became a discussion became an argument became something that was up for grabs after I had played with basic for the first time I looked at the New York city streets and said oh my gosh this is a grid pattern not because cities grow up into grids but because someone at some point in history decided to make this a grid and for a 12 or 13-year-old that's that's a profound moment and it's a moment that most people don't have very often if at all in their lives over the last 253 years I've watched this possibility the possibility for computers and digital technology to open people's minds to the idea that reality itself is a program or a heck of a lot more of it is programmed as software than we like to admit um I've watched that realization completely disappear from the user experience and I feel like the window of opportunity offered by digital technology a window of opportunity as big as the invent of text as big as perhaps the invention of language is being lost as people get further and further away from the actual technology on offer and less and less capable of actually using these machines you know I really I I I believe it in a literal sense although I don't generally admit it in public when I say program or be programmed I don't mean this just as a metaphor I mean it literally I do believe that programming is the Bas they will be programmed by others you know hopefully by other people but at worst case by the machines that other people that other people embed with programs in some in some history you know I look at the invention of language terrific thing but people didn't just learn how to listen they learned how to speak right look at the invention of text people didn't learn just how to read they learned learn how to write and now we get the invention of digital Technologies and people learn how to use them but not how to program them as if and this is the argument they make as if well I can drive a car but I don't know how to fix the engine as if the relationship between the user and programmer of a piece of technology was that of a driver and an auto mechanic but it's not the relationship of a driver and an auto mechanic it's the relationship of the driver and the passenger right I'm not asking that people know how to open up their computers and replace the power supply or fix the screen luminescence I'm asking that they understand how to use the machine you know to use a computer is to program and I get that this is going to fall on deaf ears for now the only arguments so far that have had traction out in public are the Chinese are teaching programming in public school and America amans aren't that the the quotes I have from generals of the the the in the Army and the Air Force saying they can't get recruits who know how to program anymore and that our our technological superiority is falling behind you General Elder the Air Force cyber command said one generation and it's all over I mean generals aren't supposed to talk like that not not to journalists anyway I feel like people look at the digital technologies that they that they receive from the perspective of consumers you know they they they they know they they want to know what can this thing do rather than what can I make it do and that's that's I would argue it's not just a uh uh it's not just a Pity but it's dangerous in terms of uh their agency and their ability their ability to function their ability to actually be participant human beings in in a digital age now the simplest way for me to argue this um I guess both to you and to the public is that people will get better results with technology if they know what the Technologies they're using are for right it's sort of it sounds Ultra simple but it's actually a complex idea for most people if if people know what the tools they're using have been programed to do they're going to get more predictable results with them right I see I see Educators governments politicians businesses getting very uh uh getting results with their Technologies very different than what they expected to get or working against whatever their interests are and usually that's because they don't know what the tool they're using has been made to do and often they'll they'll think like they they have some problem like there's a um in the education world there's this awful but brilliant piece of software called um um what's it called Blackboard have you seen this thing it's what universities use most of them now for their sort of courses and how now Blackboard from the student or the teacher's perspective Blackboard is terrible right it's got It's just awful you run up consistently against these just terrible obstacles and extremely difficult things ways that you've got to wrap your whole self and brain and course and life around what this program needs from you in order to comply with it and most of us look and say h this is just an awful thing this software is awful if you look at it from what I'm calling the programmer's perspective you see oh no Blackboard is brilliant cuz Blackboard wasn't written for me Blackboard wasn't written for me as an educator or for that person as a student Blackboard was written for the Blackboard company to dominate education in a very particular way Blackboard was created to help create an equivalent between distance learning and real life learning so that in your classroom you're actually using this technology as much as you would long distance it's it's created just like the old school remember sticky websites it's created not to promote the users agency but to decrease the user's agency and to increase the school or the institution's dependence on this piece of software and for that it's really smart now I thought and I wrote my early books very very um uh uh optimistically about youth you know I thought that once the generation that was 12 or 13 years old when I was writing you know M's generation once they got to in their 20s and 30s once they're starting to run things everything will be okay because these people are what I call digital Natives and unlike us digital immigrants who were raised in the analog world the digital natives are going to be able to Surf this terrain you know like like like natives like native speakers they will see through all of these programmatic attempts to you know to repress their Consciousness and they'll be able to tell the difference between ads and editorial and see what's coercion and what's act what's actually truth and as you guys probably know I mean the data is in young people are way way worse at Discerning between valid information and crap online at at negotiating between sources and and and reputable material um and I had to have a good long hard think about why in at least in this one area um I was completely wrong and the reason the reason this happened I believe is because kids grew up with digital media as a given circumstance kids grew up with it as as if it were a fact of nature the same way I grew up with the grid pattern in New York as the way to do I just thought that was City I mean imagine if you woke up in a world where there was only Microsoft Windows running all the laptops out there if it you wouldn't know what an operating system was if there was only one operating system right you wouldn't know right so likewise they don't know the Alternatives they look at each thing as if it was made to do the thing that its makers are telling us it's there to do I mean talk to anybody under 17 and ask them what is Facebook for what will they tell they'll tell you Facebook is here to help me make friends right and what is Facebook for go to the boardroom if they have one I mean go to the boardroom at Facebook and what do they do what is Facebook for Facebook is there to help companies monetize the connections the relationships between young people or to create what they're calling social marketing opportunities I mean what what is it for is not what it's for right what it's for is something different you know but it comes back to program or be programmed but if they're not going to program if they're not going to learn to program then at least what I want people to know is what the tools they're using are for and the easiest way for them to do that is either for us all to be completely transparent about what it is we're doing but even if we are how can they tell the people who are being honest and transparent from the people who are being or creating opaque and dishonest interfaces they they'd have no way of knowing so what what I thought instead as as a basic and and kind of mclanes um mclanes approach to digital media is what I would do is teach people the very basic biases of digital media in other words what if Aristotle were around today and rather than writing a Poetics of Greek tragedy were writing a Poetics of New Media a Poetics of digital media what if mclan were around today and instead of looking at Electronic media and the biases of electronic compared with textual media what if he were looking at digital media well what these people would do is look at what are the main features textures biases of this technology both on on a core level in other words on an actual level from the way the technology works and then how does that um how does that bias then scale up and inform the way we interact on it right so if you look at um something say and this isn't one of my uh uh 10 biases but you look at how every uh uh online conversation or every conversation about the internet tends to polarize into good bad right there's sort of the Nick car oh the shallows and Google's making us stupid and all that or you get the you know the the Jeff Jarvis or the the the clay shery side oh it's all great and we all have cognitive Surplus and the human organism is going to rise to this next level and the amateurs are coming and who needs that and we're quashing the entire centralized corporate structure of of locks on data and learning and yay I me know but there's like no middle right where does that come from I would argue as a media theorist that comes from the basically polar nature of binary media you know of plus minus yes no make your choice the fact that this media is biased towards this uh is biased towards binary a binary logic which then leads to Polar conversations which then polarizes the political landscape that that things spin out you get your great sort of Godwin's laws about people calling each other Nazis and then the conversation ending you know when you understand that you go well that's only natural that our approaches that our feelings our emotions about technology are going to polarize really quickly you know and that's why for for me it's much less important and I think these are great writers you know and Kevin Kelly is coming next week I think he's written the best book on this uh on this score everybody is really so busy writing about what is technology doing to us what is digital technology doing to us what is Google doing to us and and I I so don't care about what what technology is doing to us I care about what are we doing to one another through technology right technology is not doing anything to you right it's people that are doing things to you at least for the time being right because these things believe it or not you know that they're made by people in rooms they make the code these are human creation you know at least for the time being until you you create the code that can really recode itself Beyond you know then we go we go Nano robotic digital and genetic you know we create the codes that code themselves uh but even if we do that we should do it carefully so because people can't or won't learn programming because they won't take two weeks and learn scratch right because they won't do LEGO Mindstorms because they think it's too much of a mathematical challenge because they've forgotten long division and don't want to be reminded that they don't know what an algorithm is we aren't going to teach this generation the Next Generation or probably the Next Generation how to program as a basic literacy skill you know it took human beings 2,000 years to decide to learn the 22l alphabet right it was Elites it was rabbis and Priests and Kings who knew how to do that even though what does it take you know it takes your kindergarten year to learn what that alphabet is and then you can read um it took people a long time to get that it'll take them a long time to get this too so in the meantime I thought I would give them simple biases and I'm going to show you a few of these less because you need to know these biases but because I think the way the way I've I've I've come up with the biases and share them um I think is a valuable way of looking at media and and at expressing media to people who don't necessarily understand it um so this is a really simple one time right for me I'm looking at now each of these each of these what I'm calling commands of of a digital age sort of uh analoges to the Commandments of the of the beginning of the axial or literate age um each one's based on one axis and then have a bias so the axis here would be the axis of time and then I'm looking at how is digital media biased with respect to time and I would argue digital technology is biased outside of time the digital technology is biased towards asynchronous activity and asynchronous behavior and partly that's and maybe coding has changed since then but in basic and C in the programming languages I learn these are sequenced events the step 10 step 20 step 30 step 40 and the computer sits and waits until it gets the input to go on to step 50 whether the input's coming from another machine or whether the input's coming from a person it's going to sit and wait and it's going to treat it the same no matter how many cycles it took to get there so computers are living outside time and I think that's why human activities that work well on computers are ones that are similarly asynchronous the early conversations I had with people like Howard reinold and Stuart bran and Kevin Kelly on something we called the well whole earth electronic link this was an asynchronous conversation environment right and what made it so special was that you had more time to think about what you were going to say than you did in the real world right you turn on your computer you you'd plug it into this something called a modem that would then dial into the internet you would download the entire conversation onto your computer you would disconnect from the internet you would read the conversation think about how you wanted to reply particip at in it then you type a few paragraphs of what you actually felt and then you'd upload it maybe the next morning maybe 2 Days Later the weird thing about the net was you actually had more time online to think about your response your participation in a conversation than you did in real life so you didn't need to be all witty like a Christopher Hitchens or someone you didn't need to have those comebacks you were actually it was as if you were as smart as those people who could come back with those fast answers even though you could do it slow was like chess by mail right you had as long as you wanted to come up with something now what happens when we take an asynchronous medium and attach it to ourselves in an always on fashion I would argue then we're working against the bias of the medium right so now we take an iPhone or what Blackberry or whatever it is put it on our body take an asynchronous medium like email and turn it into a synchronous medium like the telephone and we wonder why people start exhibiting the same symptoms as air traffic controllers and 9 111 operators you know why people get what we now call Phantom vibration syndrome where you think your phone or your blackberry is vibrating on your thigh even though it's on your desk you know that is not adaptation that's called maladaptation right that is that is a a nervous system glitch that is that's essentially bad for you is what I would argue and it's because you're not using the technology according to its bias right you're trying to work against the bias and then you don't end up getting the strength of that media I mean another really simple one is distance the bias of dist on the axis of place or distance I would argue digital media is biased towards long distance not up close distance as is any medium right the first text when you wrote a message down the idea was now I could leave a message for you saying sorry I killed your cat leave it as a message and I can be somewhere else when he reads it right that's part of why we got Torah and Bible and all those laws is because the impact of of text of of text as a technology on culture on people and the way they looked at God they turned it into a contract all this other stuff so this is not new to digital media you know television is another great longdistance technology television literally means what remote viewing digital technology likewise is a great longdistance technology to send packets to someone far away it's a really bad up close technology right but and they praise Google while they do it I've walked into universities the University of Tennessee was the last one where they had students who lived on campus right and went to the same classroom they would come to a classroom sit in the classroom log on to computers log into second life and then engage together in a virtual simulation of their classroom and this wasn't a computer class this was a Model United Nations class that they had done every year as a Model United Nations in a room together and now they were doing it in second life together and no they didn't invite anyone from the public to come into that second life room there weren't any kids in wheelchairs stuck in their dorm rooms who got to participate because longdistance there was no distance learning aspect to it it was only people in the same room who could get into the same Second Life room right and I go to that and the kids are I mean in this case they were smart they were looking at me going this is pretty sick isn't it I mean we're paying all this money we get to this school we got we're all the way here and now we're we're doing this and the teacher afterwards is like so we're putting this on the cover of the course catalog this year to show how we're up with the Cyber age right I've I and it's it's one of of hundreds of examples of people using these Technologies up close there's this is my first PowerPoint presentation I ever made and I did it just because I had hired this comic artist to make pictures but I've been hired to do talks I've arrived at them and they've been horrified that I don't have PowerPoint to show you know they've shipped a warm body four five 6,000 miles across the world to speak to a group and because I don't have PowerPoint they're almost not going to let me go on they're calling my speaking agent this is a breach of contract what are you going to do he came without slides I'm like if you want to show I could stay in New York and send my slides right and you I have a better mic it'll all what do you need me for if they need they need the slides to Pro God knows what's happened right so they have no more respect for this thing they've lost track of the fact that 93% of human communication is non-verbal right that there's all this bandwidth stuff we don't even barely know about you know all the mirror neurons like he's nodding a little bit so my mirror neurons in my brain go oh good good good release some endorphins stay on that line there's all this going some sorry oh stuff non-verbal stuff going on that we lose so we end up living in this in this um and nothing against people with aspergers but we all end up with aspergers like symptoms when we're in Virtual spaces communicating through language think about the questions you ask what did he mean by that text I don't really know did he mean this like this that's the situation of somebody who can't read verbal cues who who has that social discomfort because they don't that's what it feels like right and that's why we behave the way we do in these spaces right so it's simple stuff like that then sometimes they get a little more complex like choice right digital spaces are bias towards choice and that's really because you've got to make a decision I always get in trouble with um uh uh recording Engineers I was a recording engineer too in my day though and the difference between an analog and a digital recording basically is choice at some point in the digital recording we must choose how to represent this notationally symbolically in terms of a number whereas with with analog recording you don't actually make that conscious Choice the the granularity of choice is dictated by the granular of the medium by the wax or the the iron filings the the the iron particles on the tape right but when you're picking your color in Adobe Color Picker right it's either going to be you know your blue is going to be 0.0021 or 0.0022 it's not going to be in between those two unless you go out another digit then you're making a choice about how many digits you go out and then 0125 or 0126 right it's everything in the digital space is basically a snap 2 Grid in one way or another right you're here or you're here you're here or you're here right you're not here right and you can't be right their choice has to be made if you're going to go on Facebook you know are you married or single are you looking or not looking are you this or that not just binary choices but choices in the end to have a database in a traditional sense you've got to make a predetermined series of choices for the user not that this is a bad thing not that the the engineer thinks oh I'm going to box those people into my categories of humans but you've got to make a choice in order to negotiate with digital representations at least for now and I'm arguing you can always choose none of the above that you don't have to Define yourself in terms of those choices for me the most dangerous thing about Facebook is not the destruction of social relationships but the destruction of identity the fact that people are using young people are using Facebook as a mirror and they're tweaking their their uh what is it called their Pages you know they're as if they're tweaking their identity as if they're this is me you know oh I'll get a side okay no I like this book instead of that one you know and each little thing when that becomes the mirror of what they are I'm not concerned so much we talked about this about the narcissism involved as that they take that as a representation of who they are that those are the choices and they're not you know and and accepting those choices it's just like when you go to the grocery store and you think oh my gosh look how many choices there are of detergent there's this whole you know aisle with 500 kinds of different detergent each in their own beautiful plastic bottle with the big spout or the little spout or the HD or this so there's 500 choices of which detergent solution you're going to have to your laundry problem as if there were no other Solutions than corporate made plastic bottle detergent to clean clothes and there are I mean you can buy those little nuts from India if you want that clean it just as well and don't put phosphates in the I mean there's a whole mess of things you know just because you have more Choice which is what Kevin argues Kevin Kelly is the great thing about technology just because you have more choices doesn't mean you have more agency it just means you have a wider number of choices or things like I mean there's a whole bunch of them we don't need to go go through all of them um scale is a great one for you guys I mean the idea of of one size does not fit all there's this sense online and you know Tim O'Reilly and John battel talk about it a lot that everything online must scale you know whenever you talk to someone in Business Online they're like how is it scale how will it scale how will it scale up it's got to scale if it doesn't scale it's like it's not real right and what they decided what what O'Reilly decided was now we're out of Web point2 Web 2.0 now we're in Webb cubed right and it what you want to do is get away from actually doing anything and become the indexer of people who are doing stuff it's like you finally realized what Google does right but his idea is like you don't want to be writing books you want to be Amazon aggregating books you want to want to be the music store you want to be the music meta music store aggregating music stores the problem with that from a postmodernist perspective is if you get in an infinite regressive Loop Loop right so all right why don't I just be the aggregator of aggregators then and then he could be the aggregator of aggregator aggregators you know with so on and so on it's like I'm going to start the incubator that incubates incubators or the one that incubates incubator incubating incubators but you can keep going forever the fact that you can keep going forever means that it doesn't actually work right that that's actually a place that's not the creation of value that's the extraction of value and that's what we're looking at there and that's a story for another day but that's really the incompatibility of 21st century economics with the 13th century currency operating system that we're trying to run this economy on right but it's it's it's why we're having the stock market crash it's why we're having the banking crash it it there's a number of reasons but it's it's this Jack Welch idea that what you want to do is get away from having a productive business sell off your Aerospace sell off your washing machines don't do any of that real stuff become a hold company or become a bank get closer and closer to just if you want to make money just get closer and closer to making money right that's I mean and it makes sense in a society where the making of money is making of money right where the making of money is tied to the creation of value though you want to do something else and that's the beauty of what goes on here right whenever you you're having a positive conversation about Google what is that conversation about it's not about oh look at all the advertising Revenue we've gotten no the positive conversation about Google is how have we helped people create value who wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise right what you're doing in the best case scenario is restoring the pre-renaissance peer-to-peer economy that was destroyed by Central Banking destroyed by Monopoly Charters and destroyed by really a a a collusion between government and a few corporations to prevent a peer-to-peer economy and recentralize economic AC right when you let me write a book and sell it to him without Amazon without Harper Collins without borrowing money from Chase or JP Morgan you've done something really powerful right you haven't just disintermediated one company you've you've disintermediated the central economy right and you've restored my ability to create value without having a job and what is a job but a legacy of this old Industrial Age model that was created to prevent V us from just doing stuff right late Middle Ages Europe end of feudalism what was going on people were doing stuff and getting rich that's what was happening there were Merchants starting to travel around and trade there were people developing crafts all these people who had been peasants were now doing stuff trading with one another using local currencies but transacting and getting wealthy they were what was called the bis the aristocracy hated the bgea why because the more boua you became the less the less dependent you were on centralized power on Lords and lasses right to give you the land to go make your food on so what did they do they ended the peer-to-peer economy with law that's what chartered monopolies were no one's allowed to do any business in this industry except my friend you want to do that business now you work for him that's what chartered monopolies and the corporations we know today that's what that the code is based on that and the second was centralized currency you're not allowed to transact with one another unless you bought borrow this transaction medium from a central bank from us from our treasury this was how the rich got to stay Rich simply by being rich rather than creating value and that worked for 600 years as long as we could expand the economy through other places and extract their their value and their labor computer broke that right and you guys broke that more than most by realizing bottom up it's sort of there's a whole bunch of technologies that you look at from tagging from tagging and Google versus original Yahoo and hierarchy say you know it's it's one is letting letting the network and letting people in a peer-to-peer decentralized fashion actually create the aggregate value together and the other is the Industrial Age model of extracting value from people before they've actually had the ability to recoup any of it or transact any of it themselves when you guys are are on target you're doing that and that is the most revolutionary thing to happen in 600 years using a medium that I would argue is the biggest thing to happen in you know 22 or 2400 years which leads to to some some stuff that's exciting these are just some of the other other rules my little commands they're not meant as Commandments that you have to follow but more commands that give you command over over these Technologies um be yourself I just don't like the way the net is biased towards people who are anonymous anonymous and away from people's identities you know when forchan or someone wants to come after me how do they do that by revealing who I am right by showing this is his kid this is his house this is his phone number my identity who I am is my liability that sucks right so I think the more we are present online the more we are ourselves the more anonymity is an aberant Behavior or the behavior for an activist is going to get killed the better off we are um social don't sell your friends um this is just an argument that the net is actually a social place it is a social medium that has fought off many efforts to tell the truth I believe that the net is biased towards facts right not always truthful facts but towards facts it's a non-fiction medium think storytelling and mythology the all the stuff of The Branding and printing press eras don't work as well as facts when you're trying to even if you're trying to socially Market something what will spread about your product right will the idea that it's baked by elves in a hollow tree spread on social networks or will the fact that you used organic ingredients or will the fact that some kid in New Guinea got his f fingers cut off in your cookie factory right it's it's the facts that spread that's the way people gain social currency is by by sharing information even gossip um this is just a very simple answer to the the whole openness copyright nonsense problem is so not a problem right the reason we don't steal stuff is because we have a social contract not to do that right I want that mic I need a mic I'm not going to steal that mic not because I couldn't get away with it I could get away with it probably even after saying this I don't do it because we don't do that right but we don't have any such social code online so my my argument for the bias of openness yes the net is biased towards openness is share do not steal going along with that though in a particularly Google fashion many people feel that as an author I should basically share everything I write for free comments on online period no matter what and you know there's this there's this ethos as if it's like as if by charging for the stuff I've created I'm somehow against the boing boing Linux openness thing and what they don't realize is that when I share my writing for free online value is still being extracted by companies very often you guys right if if people are accessing my data through Google index is Google is still advertising Google is still extracting value from the ability to index and send people to my thing but they're not passing that value on to me unless we enter into some interesting deal um and I st putting ads on my stuff where rert Murdoch for however evil and conservative and fox newsy he is at least he cut me in on his take right so the the idea that that open source and openness and free and everything that they're all equivalent is kind of M L um is muddled in people's minds and it goes hand inand with this sort of deprofessionalization of content creation the idea that we don't really need professional journalists because anyone can write a blog right it's like no that argument doesn't really hold there's governments and corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create really cogent look public relations nodules to uh to to spit out at us and we need professional journalists to disassemble them and understand them you know we can't as amateurs we don't have the time and energy to do it but and then finally program or be programmed my idea here is just to just to let people know that the programs they're using are embedded with purpose right whether they know what that purpose is or not it's not conspiratorial purpose it's not negative purpose it's just purpose that these tools are not like rakes or shovels or steam engines right these are tools that are embedded with programs which means they do go on they do have biases even more powerful than the biases of the tools we use and the biases of our Technologies matter you know guns don't kill people people kill people right but guns are more biased towards killing than pillows right they're biased right and each of the Technologies we use are biased and they and they go on right they continue on so my my my plea um to you guys is I I totally get that most people that the 90% who don't want to understand media and Technology currently cannot tell the difference between honest software and dishonest software they can't tell the difference between transparency and opacity they can't recognize ethical coding and and uh programs that actually are serving their interests from ones that aren't um and you're moving into an increasingly competitive software marketplace where the people who Hoodwink them may actually get an initial leg up on you right just like a stupid fascist politician may get early interest that a non-fascist educating one won't get but I am working hard I am dedicating myself to getting the masses um if you want to call it that to getting people to the ability where they can recognize the difference between the good stuff and the crap um and and so so please um don't lose hope don't lose faith in their ability to distinguish between when you're doing it right and when you're doing it in that expedient way that you know is just going to kind of work because they're dumb um in the long run we will end up we will end up with a smarter civilization um as a result okay that's probably enough for me to to start do you guys have thoughts questions I wrote a book it's here it's for sale here this is the interesting thing about Google it's here cheaper than I can buy it from the publisher as an author which is got if you guys don't buy them I'm going to buy the rest of them because it's it's a better deal than I can get or at least stick it in your libraries this is a nice short digital generation 140 page half a plane ride book so you can read the book and still watch the movie um and and it's it's a I mean I like to think if mclan were around it'd be the kind of way that he would treat um digital media and there's nobody doing it there's just nobody I don't know everybody is is so busy applying these insights to either to to business or to the argument about is technology good or bad that nobody's really looking at digital media as an event what is what is happening to Civilization now you know and I think that's um that's to me is the important is the important question this is as big as text and things will arise from this as big as judeo-christianity as big as the Industrial Age as big as centralized currency now really what Craigslist did to the newspaper is like such a blip compared you know to what e-currency will do to central banks to what communication is going to do to nation states to what uh uh appear peer transaction is going to do to corporatist monopolies to what longdistance modeling is going to do for um local sustainability I mean it's it's we are we are on the edge of something so potentially great it could make it so we don't all die in the next couple of centuries it really could um we could we could we could flip this thing and uh I I think people need to need to get that and that's not and it's so not hard is the thing if they're willing just to think for half an hour you know oh there's me any thoughts though questions concerns yeah oh there's a mic see if the mic is on yes uh I have two pieces of good news for you so one is AdSense where you can get a little bit of funds if you publish stuff online and you don't have to publish your books but you know I mean if you have a Blog add the AdSense to it and you'll get a cut of Revenue so you know and it's better from Google than from who was the murd guy yeah Murdoch uh the other thing is uh on on the more serious topic I I I like actually your uh your thoughts on people actually understanding programming I I I came from you know that the same generation you like we used to do our own stuff and all that which is something that uh people don't do but uh it reminds me about uh a transition that happened in the in the early 50s as well when uh people transitioned from coding machines by plugging wires and things that were utterly inefficient and and not very well mapped to the way our brains work into something that was more comprehensible uh computer languages uh I know of groups now that work uh on on transitioning you like on doing the next phase transition basically the the Lang the computer languages seem to be the limiting factor now we and and the reason you know like it is purely driven by economy I mean there's not even uh you know like the social push or anything like that to do this it's just the fact that we cannot I mean we have more and more and more gadgets and services and everything in the world and we're running out of programmers I mean the the schools cannot produce it so we're we're going to see a transition really soon and I think it may address some of the some of the issues that that that that you bring on about understanding the the technology so I mean the thing is when we say we are running out of programmers I wonder is everyone running out of programmers everybody according to we run models and you know like we're going to China doesn't have enough programmers no I thought they're turning out like a thousand for every one of ours it it it takes time to train them I mean training and you know when you model the proliferation of services gadgets and products that are getting out and you know like how much output schools have where you like they right well public education in America is kind of it's going to be in transition for the next 20 30 years um and not teaching programming any time soon we never taught media literacy in America we never taught them how to watch television so we're not going to teach them how to use computers we're going to teach them how to use software right you go take a computer class in high school in America they teach you Microsoft Office right or they'll teach you Google Docs I mean great but but the the answer to that I think is to turn Computing into a counterculture um so the the and I still i' I've asked for my invite like three times now with different email addresses um but the the app the app builder do you know what I'm talking about Android app builder yes yeah App Inventor now if App Inventor I mean Android is pretty clean I've been playing with Android is a pretty clean as as python if not easier language if the app builder get a language that's the problem right but if you can turn I mean if you can turn app builder into basically an objectoriented scratch like thing that then has a you learn all that then you tear down another level to then how do you build those then tear down another level to how do you build those you're there Google's got the the staff to do that I mean how much would that take Allan K could do it with a dozen people right in 40 years um you would think Google could do it with eight people in two years I mean how hard is that it's it's been work done is that hard it's it is hard yes because it's a phase transition you have to change uh people's minds as well it's not only Chang want to make apps so kids the hunger to make an app is is not so different from the Hunger to get on American Idol it really isn't CU kids see the apps they see the phones they see people using them and they think they really do I could do that you know and once they think I can do that there something that LEGO Mindstorms failed right I I was in on that I thought that was going to be the thing Seymour papert and the whole and what did kids do they didn't want Mindstorms they wanted bionical they wanted not even Lego they wanted Lego that was less Lego than Lego right that there less components more just here's what you do here are the steps I mean Bionicles is anti- Lego from that perspective but um somehow the idea of combining if you get an app and you put it up and you get the downloads and you get the money you know and you're in junior high school I'm going to let my colleagues now ask more questions but it's in that direction yeah I mean that's that's where to go and that that change that phase change could happen faster than you think I mean look at the the look at the demo look at the demographics on the people asking for invitations and it's going to be kind of shocking here so you talked a little earlier about uh uncritical acceptance of uh things like Facebook do you see this as part of a broader cultural Trend uh you know you mention it as being specific to technology but I don't see it as being all that different from the way people uh think about Coca-Cola and the Department of Defense and so on yeah I think it's the same I think it's the same exact thing I mean there was a great debate between Walter Litman and John Dewey in the early 1900s where Walter Litman wrote the first books on propaganda he was Ed Bern's teacher and and he basically said that people are stupid they just have pictures in their heads they don't really know what's going on and all we can do is get a benevolent Elite to run things who then hire very clever public relations people who get the masses to be compliant John Dewey saw this he was an old guy at like 80-year-old uh teacher at Columbia Teachers College and he was like oh my God this is crazy and he started writing all these articles and letters saying no people can be educated they can be smart enough we just need new the new relationship between people and the press and educ and all this and um it fell mostly on deaf ears and and that's the way it's basically Lipman has been right through most of history people look at the world uncritically and unthinkingly to me we have these windows of opportunity the invention of language may have been one but the invention of text was certainly one and the invention of digital technology is another one we get these windows of opportunity for the other 90 % to go oh I get it we're all in charge of reality you know that that we can actually participate in this thing um and and I don't know I just don't know how many more of those opportunities we get so I would argue yes this is the status quo and it's going to be exacerbated by digital technology but um it could just as easily be be broken free you know that this is that this is another moment for humans to get smart it's just hard you know we want to make a living and programmers are in the employ of big companies that that's not their interest hi I had a question I'm actually a middle school teacher that's been here for a year and will be here for a little more time um and I'm working on a project that whose goal is kind of to get some of these thinking skills into students at a younger age and one um one glitch in the actual programming like actual coding is you know actually having the hardware or to do the app inv ventor type of stuff you know we don't have phones in our classroom whatever for the moment so to what extent do you feel that just the thinking skills which we refer to as cognitive thinking can be taught in the value of teaching them without actual Hardware we're we're thinking that a lot of that can be done but do you have much experience with that a lot of it I mean I mean most of my experiences with that I write books right I write books that change people's relationship to digital technology without programs so I think yeah I think a heck of a lot of it can be done I think it would be more like new media literacy than programming you know but you know but how did I learn C was reading a book I mean I haven't used I haven't used a whole bunch of tutorials and things and you know I feel like it's certainly in terms of public school kids have enough screen time in the real world and it's sort of like the the the opportunity in the school setting is that face-to-face interaction what kids need more experience with now is the kinesthetic relationship of human beings in a room together I mean that's that's the thing they have the least the the least ability to do so I think you could get a heck of a lot of it and then if they're going to actually learn how to program then they should probably have the tools yeah okay thank you I would agree though yeah hi uh thanks very much for coming today oh thanks for having me uh so I actually work on books and news um and so I worked in both those professions before coming here where they have things called editors uh and they add value in a way that you know uh uh consumers can't and that the companies can't but these people in the middle who are kind of like very talented generalists in a way um and as I keep hearing in both Industries about like the wave of crowdsourcing and so on I just want to get your thoughts on whether you think that wave is so great that we will lose that kind of skilled middleman in a way that helps not only extract value but create value um or whether uh we'll still have those people who can help do that no I think he's coming back you know the the thing what happened was which the shortest way to tell this story the artificial spike in CD sales when Boomers replace their connections of records with CDs led to corporate conglomeration of media content where big companies bought up all the CD companies thinking they would get rich after they bought up all them and movie studios they went to buy book publishers thinking that this was a great source for media what they didn't realize was that books is not a growth industry books is a sustainable industry so the only way they could meet their debt structure demands was by reducing bottomline costs rather than increasing Topline growth so what they did was got rid of the people that they thought were inefficient those were editors because the editors who took time to actually read and edit books as opposed to those who just acquired them and sold them were looked at as the bad part of the value chain rather than the only part of the value chain so everyone was gone from publishing except acquiring editors and marketing people who then just Justified their existence with longer and longer turnaround more and more middlemen more and more value extraction and the industry got worse and worse those editors still exist though they've been spit out the good ones are the ones who got fired and they're trying to work at teeny independent publishing companies who can actually be enabled and empowered through peer-to-peer uh this peer-to-peer con connectivity you know what I would want is Google Books to replace Amazon you know because if Google Books replaces Amazon then I can sell my book to anyone here's the link now buy it from me use my PayPal use my Google I'll do Google Checkout I'll give you the 5% whatever you want please just free me of that give me an aggregator for cont content that people trust and let us just sell it to each other then what do I do I hire an Editor to help me with my book and that's fine too I know them they're out there it just the business model changes but yeah we of course we need them I haven't had an editor in in 10 15 years you know and I've only once had the same person buy my book as as sell it out into production the turnover was so rapid so we need to wrap up momentarily cuz we're past 1:00 but truly one of my great passions over the last 20 years years has been trying to trip up rushkoff in public and prove that he's wrong about something so I just want to ask you one question about Facebook before we end I couldn't help noticing we all think about Facebook a lot and I'm incredibly impressed with what they've done what that one of your Commandments is be yourself and I just want to ask you is it not the very both Social Power and financial power of Facebook that 500 million people have actually chosen to join a social network as themselves and isn't that interesting in a positive way it is but the only environment in which people are willing to be themselves is in the consumer environment where they Define themselves through their product purchases the place that I'm concerned about is all the comments on every bulletin board I mean it's it's right now and it's good part of why Facebook works is that people are being themselves you know and when someone's not or someone sort of one of those things you kind of don't want them on your page or they say those ridiculous things you can defriend them so easily Facebook is basically just a self- moderated I mean what is your wall but a self- moderated comments comments list but you know I I refuse I'm comments I'll leave comments on my blog but you got to say who you are you know really you do unless you really are you know an Iranian who's going to get your head cut off for telling the truth on this on on my site right and then that you know it's fine I'll let you be anonymous and I'll remove your IP address or whatever you not that they should be wasting their time on my blog if they if that's you know that shouldn't be their their Forum but yeah I think that's part of what that's part of what makes it work I think people do want to be themselves in safety

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 28,207

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Program or Be Programmed, Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, Ten Commands for a Digital Age, what are the digital age ten commands, Digital Age

Id: BXjRaoTPlPE

Length: 55min 40sec (3340 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2011