Reading Jonathan Zittrain”s The Future of the Internet (2008) was thought-provoking! Aside from narrating snipets of history from the first Apple II to the iPhone, “we learn something important about where the Internet has been, and something more important about where it is going. The PC revolution was launched with PCs that invited innovation by others. So too with the Internet. Both were generative: they were designed to accept any contribution that followed a basic set of rules (either coded for a particular operating system, or respecting the protocols of the Internet).”
Zittrain defines Generativity as the “system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” Giving a very simple example: Duct tape is generative, anchor bolt is non-generative, is direct to the point. He also identified three basic principles:
“Our information technology ecosystem functions best with generative technology at its core.”
“Generativity instigates a pattern both within and beyond the technological layers of the information technology ecosystem.”
“Proponents of generative systems ignore the drawbacks attendant to generativity’s success at their peril.”
He goes on to say that openness, free and commons have elements of generativity, but sometimes they might obscure the latter. Five principal factors: leverage, adaptability, ease of mastery, accessibility and transferability—often reinforcing one another—make tools and systems generative. “Maximizing these qualities facilitates the technology’s deployment in unanticipated ways.” Compared to its cousins, the Free Software Philosophy might at times be deficient in terms of accessibility. The Theory of Affordances, premised on technical user empowerment, might lack leverage. Creative Commons, however, as with generative systems, can encourage creativity and spur innovation. The strength of generative systems comes from its nature to facilitate change with innovative output and participatory input, moreover, this “openness to unanticipated change” becomes the paradox of generativity.
The generative Internet might take control lessons from the tethered appliance: preemption, specific injunction, and surveillance. Also, lessons from Wikipedia, the epitome of generative at content level, primarily premised on “standards can work better than rules in unexpected contexts.” Zittain elucidates:
“Rules are less subject to ambiguity and, if crafted well, inform people exactly what they can do, even if individual situations may render the rule impractical or, worse, dangerous. Standards allow people to tailor their actions to a particular situation. Yet they also rely on the good judgment of often self-interested actors—or on little-constrained second-guessing of a jury or judge that later decrees whether someone’s actions were unreasonable.”
Generativity and its problems flow from one layer to another: the content layer and the technical layer. The difference between these two layers: much content-layer participation is an innately social activity and many content-layer enterprises have “developed technical tools to support collective participation, augmenting an individualistic ethos with community mechanisms.” Zittrain proposes two approaches, based on these two differences, to lengthen the “generative spirit of the Net” and “bring the generative Net fully into its own”:
“The first is to reconfigure and strengthen the Net’s experimentalist architecture to make it fit better with its now-mainstream home. The second is to create and demonstrate the tools and practices by which relevant people and institutions can help secure the Net themselves instead of waiting for someone else to do it.”
A generativity principle suggests: first, bridge the divide between those concerned with network connectivity and protocols and those concerned with PC design; and second, rethink our vision of the network itself”, i.e., “Middle” and “endpoint” are virtually obsolete.
A Generative Future, Zittrain recommends, need to maintain data portability, network neutrality, privacy as software becomes service and regulators’ tolerance. For data portability: a generative insurance policy to apply to individual data wherever it might be stored; for network neutrality: wide-open competition is good; for privacy as software becomes service: it is important to export the values of privacy against government intrusion along with them; and for regulators’ tolerance: ensure that individual wrongdoers can be held directly responsible or a “liability for technology producers in certain circumstances.”
With peer production, i.e., “aggregation of small contributions of individual work can make once difficult tasks seem easy; . . . the public is variously creator, beneficiary, and victim of the free-for-all.” Several contemporary avenues like the code of fair information, captchas, reCaptchas, robots.txt, metadata, Creative Commons license, privacy “tags”, or contextualization offer ways for privacy in a generative internet.
Zittrain concludes the book with a caution:
“Instead of being subject to technology that automates and reinforces the worst aspects of contemporary education . . . our children ought to be encouraged to accept the participatory invitation of the Net and that which has recursively emerged at its upper layers from its open technologies below.”
Notes:
Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. The cover was designed by Ivo van der Ent, based on his winning entry of an open competition at www.worth1000.com. back to text
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The Grey Chronicles 