Howard Rheingold on Coast to Coast AM explores the internet’s explosive growth—500M users by 2000—and its dual role in empowering decentralized protests (e.g., Estrada’s ouster via texts) while enabling surveillance like Poindexter’s proposed Information Awareness Office, sparking debates on encryption, digital piracy, and job displacement. He warns of systemic fragility, from hackable routers to FCC spectrum auctions ($150B globally), and frames tech as an evolutionary tool, though critics fear it erodes privacy or even spiritual autonomy. Ultimately, the episode blends internet revolution with dystopian caution, questioning whether progress comes at the cost of control—or freedom. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest.
If you all speaking, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the Cosmos.
I'm Art Bell, and this program covers the Cosmos, Coast, Coast, Coast, Coast, A.M. Coming up in a moment, somebody I wanted to interview for years now.
Mark Burnett is an Emmy-winning producer and founder of the Echo Challenge.
Have you seen that?
A series of extreme, very extreme sporting events that have aired on MTV, SPN, Discovery Channel, and the USA Network.
His CBS series Survivor and Survivor 2 are among the most popular in television history.
Period.
In addition to producing, Burnett is an avid extreme sportsman who also speaks frequently on leadership in team building for corporations all over the world.
Burnett is a former member of the famed British Army Parachute Regiment with active service medals in both the Northern Ireland and Argentina conflicts.
He is an open water certified scuba diver, level A certified skydiver.
Wow.
Has completed a whitewater guide course and is Advanced Wilderness First Aid Certified.
You know who he is.
I've been just waiting for this one for a long time.
Coming up in a moment, Mark Burnett.
unidentified
Shhhhhh.
Rzzzzz You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20, 2002.
Yeah, Eco Challenge really is kind of like an expedition with all the problem-solving elements and exhaustion, but with a stopwatch.
So it's teams of four racing over 300 miles non-stop, solving expedition-style problems and going a very long way across mountain ranges or through jungles or over deserts, trying to reach an elusive finish line.
And the great television comes from the human interaction and social dynamics that, as it breaks down, as this team are trying desperately to reach this finish line.
But earlier today on our own newscast here, I heard that in a survey today in America, more people knew because of Survivor where the Marquesas Islands were than knew where Afghanistan, for example, was.
I mean, that's amazing, Mike.
That's amazing.
Number one, Americans don't know.
Half of them or a tenth of them couldn't even tell where America was on a map.
But you've at least done something to educate the public about some geography.
I mean, let's face it, we've got 20 million people minimum per week watching Survivor.
You know, one of the greatest characters in Survivor is the location.
I knew that from the beginning.
And so in choosing a location, I'm introducing these minimally 20 million people a week to somewhere exotic and fresh to them, almost a vicarious travel experience.
And if you watch it for three months straight, you're bound to get a clue of where it is.
Because these days, of course, the internet is a great extension of the television experience.
And you go on the internet and find out more.
And one of the things you find out is, here's a map of the world, and where on earth is this thing.
So that's why it's not so surprising.
And let's face it, I mean, America is such a powerful, giant country.
Many Americans don't feel the need to find out what's outside of American shores.
But anyway, at least you're showing them some small part of it that they understand or even aren't motivated to go out and get a globe and say, gee, where is that?
Oh, look, it's there.
So, good.
The first survivor that you did, I think a lot of Americans think, or at least I think, that the characters like Rudy Bosch, Richard, Susan, boy, some of those amazingly strong characters in that first survivor just really, I thought, made that show.
I mean, it was something that had never been done before.
That kind of television had never, ever been seen before.
In fact, if you look at the ratings for what was a summer series, which is where technically, or traditionally, the network air reruns because they don't know what to put on.
That's right.
And viewers tend to gravitate more towards cable in the summer.
Well, CBS put this network series of mine, Survivor On.
It ended up with the highest ratings since Sunny and Share in 1973 in Normandy.
I mean, 51 million people watched the finale.
So it was a special experience.
Since then, of course, we've had less viewers, but still, for last television season, our combined series, The Africa and Marketers, were number one and two, beating Friends NER in number of viewers.
With respect to both of the shows, Eco Challenge and Survivor to a lesser degree, are you folks in TV concerned about either serious injury, and I've seen some fairly serious injury, or even death?
I mean, death must be a very big concern of reality television these days, all days.
Psychologically, but we do great testing free survivor to make sure no one goes on the game that would be a harm to themselves or to others, no matter what happens.
And you'll find, or so they say, you know, like a race horse will go 100% and run, run, run till it dies.
Human beings will get up after 5% of their efforts been given.
You can do a lot more than you think, and survivor proves that.
And so, no, we don't test people while they're starving, but we give them a test called the MMPI, which is the same as given to law enforcement like federal officers.
It tests personality and truthfulness, sticking to it, logic, and integrity.
And following that, then they had in-person psychologists interview them for hours on end.
So by the time someone gets to having a chance to be on the show, really mentally, in their mental health at least, cleared them as well as, of course, their background changes.
No, because everybody will do that stuff under the right pressure.
If you cast someone who is insincere and manipulating to begin with, it would almost become a caricature and be unbelievable.
Instead, we just merely need to cast 16 people who are very A-type, who are all leaders in their own right, put them in a situation without enough food and put stress and a million dollars at stake.
All 16 of them will melt down at one point and make great TV.
And it's more believable taking sincere, logical people, than it would be casting crazy people.
I was watching Nikotown in Borneo, and I remember one of the teams, I don't remember which one, but, oh, God, they showed their feet, you know, and it was pathetic.
I mean, they were just goozing oozing sores.
you know, no human could walk on those feet.
And these people were sitting around in the, I think it was a jungle in the middle of the night, and the only way they kept going was by figuring out different ways to curse you and say that you had planned all of this pain and you knew exactly how to inflict just the right amount of pain and torture and get them in the very worst way.
And those people stay live out there by thinking of ways to get you, Mark.
Well, I noticed that whether it's Survivor and the interview on CBS the next day, which is not really the next day, or whether it's EcoChallenge and the people who leave like saying never again.
But everybody, the Survivor, everybody, given a chance, almost every single one of them, save one lately, I suppose, has said, oh my God, yes, I'd do it in a second.
I'd do it again.
And they do.
They keep coming back to do it again and again, don't they?
And that's what makes EcoChall so pure, is it really is an inner quest.
People are doing it because they want to do it.
But the great thing is, you know, win, lose, or draw, succeed or fail, it tends to be a life-changing experience and gives you some anchoring of hardship, which unfortunately in our modern lives, everything's become so easy.
You know, it's not like the old days of true expeditions and exploration.
Eco-Challenge gives you a little taste of that, at least for a couple of weeks.
Well, some of them are repeat who we know, and some of it is first come, first served, and a few of them basically put all the names we got in that 20 minutes into a hat and make it into a lottery.
So there's a number of different ways that people get in.
In Borneo, the one you mentioned, somebody started to pay attention to our instructions and instead of walking their mountain bike down a jungle track, tried to ride it, I think they knew better, over the handlebars, into a tree and were pierced in the lung with a branch and the lung collapsed and I landed my helicopter.
My doctor, an Australian Ado, was there and had to re-inflate this guy's lung right there and then in the mud.
And the guy did live.
And the guy, I can't wait to race again.
It's a strange one.
You know, every year people do get sick.
We just finished in Fiji and the Fiji race was at Beyond Television on USA Network in April.
And during that, a number of people have been in hospital with various tropical diseases following that race.
I mean, after Borneo race, I think we had 300 people hospitalized with a form of leptosporosis, which is a jungle disease that comes out of some interaction with animal feces in water.
Once again, here is Mark Burnett, and here's a question as a viewer that I've always wanted to ask Mark, and that is, for example, on Survivor.
I'm wondering if your television show, as Survivor progresses, formulates challenges that are strategic for the game.
Now, what do I mean to that?
I mean by that.
I mean, for example, if one team has been basically decimated in the voting and they're weak as willows and they're physically bereft of even probably being able to slug across the sand very fast, do you make it a mental challenge to make it easier for that group?
No, pretty much all the challenges are preordained and bring it out on a grit before we ever start the game.
But what we have learned is that you won't see many challenges these days which are all one thing or all of another.
I mean, in the very early times, we were quite lucky that we had very physical challenges which seemed to be that it was very balanced in the voting off, week in, week out.
If we would have been unlucky and had a purely one strong team versus a weaker tribe and had that physical challenge, it could have been an easy win.
Obviously, you don't want to see that.
You always want to make it fair.
But now, all the challenges involve an equal amount of each in each challenge, physical and mental.
In the show, Survivor, how long is it for a group that begins to get hungry and is having a hard time to begin to forget that the cameras are in their face?
Oh, in Survivor and EcoChallenge, in both cases, it happens.
within a couple of hours they could care less about the cameras.
The experience is so real.
In the case of EcoChalle, it's very, very hard, and they're racing against the clock, so they really don't even think about the cameras.
In Survivor, the peer pressure situation of the social dynamics is so great, they're far more worried with the other 15 people are thinking about them than some plastic and metal camera happens to be there.
If you saw a videotape of yourself for a day at work and saw a reaction to other people to some of your stupid comments and the way you behave, you'd be far less liked to keep making those comments.
And for example, you should know, as far as accommodations, in most cases, Jeff Probst and I have both been in a small dome tent each, similar to everybody else on the 300 or 400 person crew.
And other times we've been lucky enough to have beach cabins to live in, which has been very, very nice with flushing toilets.
But most of the time, it's porter potties, showers manufactured, you know, shower boats which are manufactured from just water that heats up in solar, and tents.
Well, there's many things that have not been on television, and it's not, I don't wish I could, because what makes Survivor greater than the number of viewers?
I mean, think about that.
We, even last year, both of our series beat ER, DSI, or Friends.
And of course, the Russians had to de-orbit the Mir space station, which therefore, one of the first times ever in a contract that I've been involved in, force majeure or act of God comes into play because the very item that you've contracted for no longer exists.
The orbit breaks up in the atmosphere and falls into the ocean.
But I've not stopped pursuing it and I am still in negotiations now for rights to use Soyuz rockets and go to the International Space Station, so I'm still working on it.
Survivor belongs in an organic survival situation.
There'll be a whole nother television show, probably called Destination Space, which is about a bunch of Americans going through cosmonaut training with a view to going to space.
And I may not even pull it off art.
I mean, I'm trying, but eventually someone will make privatization of space work.
There will be media projects around going to space.
Whichever one it is, whether it's Survivor or EcoChallenge, when it's over, do they almost go through the same kind of decompression experience?
Is it really hard to come back after something of that magnitude, whether it would be EcoChallenge or whether it would even be Survivor?
Just get on an airliner, come back to the U.S., and all of a sudden you're coming from an island and a limited situation, in a stressful situation, right back, boom, into the middle of all the cars and concrete and airplanes and everything.
In either one of the two programs, Mark, have you developed any really favorite contestants or favorite teams that you just sort of you're rooting for personally?
On 9-11, when that disaster happened, I in fact was in the middle of prepping for Survivor Arabia and had 50 people working in Jordan in a place called Wadi Rum on the Saudi border where David Lean shot Lawrence of Arabia.
And I couldn't get them out for over a week.
There were no flights to America, especially out in the Middle East.
And I had to cancel that project and went out and only had five and a half weeks to figure out where it would be instead.
And that's when I chose the Marquesas.
It normally takes eight months to find a location and choose it and do it.
We had five and a half weeks and we chose Marquesas and did it.
Well, I mean, if you have an island, it's a pretty controlled situation where very nearly the TV crew, for that period of time, anyway, can almost control the entire environment on that island.
People don't really bother anymore because we now have figured this out so much that, quite frankly, the internet and the public don't really want to guess who wins.
They like playing the game along week to week.
And even people like National Enquirer have said publicly, even if they found out who won, they wouldn't publish it because their readers would be mad at them.
But beyond the contract, there's a level of integrity where you've given a couple of months of your life to play an incredibly deep-rooted sensory experience game.
And, you know, why ruin it for everybody, including yourself?
You can't just keep your mouth shut for a few weeks.
And whether it's unscripted drama, which is what Survivor is, or whether it is comedy or drama, or even news these days, it all has the entertainment storytelling value to it.
And if you can tell good stories and have high production values, you'll stand on TV.
The audience don't really care whether it's scripted or not.
They just care whether it's interesting and whether it's compelling.
And that's what matters.
So unscripted fare is here to stay.
It's just about executing it and making it really, really good.
Listen, coming up, let me announce something that's not announced yet.
As many of you know, maybe some of you don't know, this Friday there's going to be a television on the sci-fi, a television program on the sci-fi channel that is a pretty serious show.
It's going to give you the results of an archaeological dig in Roswell, New Mexico.
They're going to where the alleged crash was.
No, correction.
They went to where the original crash was, and the sci-fi channel commissioned an archaeological dig led by a William Dolman, Dr. William Dolman, who was a principal investigator at the University of New Mexico, who went to Roswell and did the dig, and the results are going to be on this Friday night on the Sci-Fi Channel.
Well, through the good auspices of my good friend Richard C. Hoagland, Dr. Dolman will be here Friday night after the program.
And so we'll get to talk to Dr. Dolman about what just occurred on TV.
So, of course, obviously you want to catch Sci-Fi Channel show.
And I'll tell you what I've heard.
I've heard rumors that they collected about 50 boxes of stuff at this dig.
Now, that may or may not be true.
We're sure going to find out Friday.
You know, that could be complete bull.
But that's what I've heard, and they've really got something.
That's what I've heard.
We'll find out Friday.
Coming up in a moment, Harold Rheingold, who was affectionately described to me by one of the staff as a techno-weenie.
We should have a lot to give you all share.
Howard and I should have a lot to share.
Howard Rheingold was writing about personal computers before they were even personal and examining the World Wide Web before it was worldwide.
One of the world's foremost authorities on the social implications of technology.
Oh, there are many, aren't they?
He's the author of the Virtual Community.
We live in that now, don't we?
Which was named to Business Week's Best Business Books of the Year list in 1993.
Virtual Reality and Tools for Thought.
His research for smart mobs, which was just named one of Strategy Plus Business Magazine's Books of the Year, took him around the world.
unidentified
but he makes his home in mill valley california which is where we're going to be going in a moment Take Coast to Coast AM with you anywhere on your mobile phone.
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Well, if you think about it, it was not too many years ago, let's say 10 years ago, this was really just a few enthusiasts, a few, meaning maybe 100,000.
Now we've got, what, about 10% of the human race are potentially all connected to each other.
Well, you know, I think every communication technology We're beginning to understand now, connects people in new ways, extends our powers in new ways, and it alienates us in new ways.
It's really not one or the other, it's both and.
But I think what we're seeing is the beginning of the third and biggest leap.
If you think of the PC starting in the 1980s and the internet starting in the 1990s, we are seeing the telephone, the mobile telephone, the personal computer, and the internet merging.
Listen, you can run your whole life from a little damn thing you can hold in your hand that's hooked up to the internet.
That's where it's going.
And I just, you know, I sort of wonder what that means.
I know you're not a sociologist or anything, but there are some people who actually say that when they look at this revolution that we're right in the middle of right now, that it actually may prevent mankind from taking the next step.
Or maybe it is in itself the next step.
But actually, there are those who argue that because of this, we won't evolve.
I mean, there will be ten major ideas in the world, and they'll be shared worldwide.
All information will be shared, and there'll be so little isolation that we just won't move forward.
We won't take the next evolutionary leap that we're supposed to otherwise take.
Well, you know, when I started looking at what does this mean, it led me to what the sociologists call collective action.
Sounds vaguely communistic, but it's really about how human societies have evolved.
If you think about it, humans have been physiologically pretty much the same creatures for quite a while, let's say, at least 100,000 years.
For most of that time, we lived in small family bands hunting small game, digging up roots, and eating berries.
At some point, family groups began to get together with other family groups.
People got together with people that they were not related to, and they learned to somehow collectively coordinate their activities so that they can break down large game.
And they started bringing down these mastodons and these big creatures, and they brought enough meat home so that they could feed everyone, and not just the hunters, and not just the small family groups.
A form of collective action started that enabled a new level of society, the tribe or the band other than the family.
And then at some point, agriculture enabled a few people to produce the food for everyone, and people began specializing.
At every step along the way, now this is where the sociology comes in, it's called solving the collective action dilemma.
The collective action dilemma is very simple.
It's that we are the descendants of highly competitive creatures.
We are self-interested, we're rational, we look after ourselves.
How do individualistic creatures get together with people they're not related to to cooperate on a larger and larger scale?
Well, they use speech, they use the alphabet, they use printing presses, now we use the internet.
I think that when we're starting to carry around with us everywhere we go devices that are quickly evolving, they're becoming much more powerful, they communicate with each other.
It's not just picking up the telephone and speaking, we can communicate data, we can surf the web, we can connect with devices in the environment.
We are going to be able to solve that collective action dilemma on a much larger scale.
And we're just seeing the beginning signs of it.
So I think that in fact it's the human mind and it's human social contracts and our communications with each other that brings us to the next level.
But the technologies enable us to do it at a larger scale.
Well, I think the one thing that distinguishes humans from the rest of the biological creation is that we extend our capabilities with our technology and we change who we are.
And we're doing it at an increasing pace.
I think we're just beginning to become aware of how we do that.
And we may have a significant advantage ahead of us in being aware of it instead of just kind of stumbling upon it.
Isn't it likely that it will have truly a worldwide impact, that it will conceivably even threaten governments, that it will change the face of the globe in many ways, that some governments may be brought down because of it, that the barriers that were once up can no longer be up.
And one of the things that got me to start thinking about writing a book about this was I saw some disconnected events that seemed to me to have a connection.
There are these teenagers all over the world.
I've seen them myself in Japan, in Scandinavia, in South America.
They use this text messaging.
It's very big in the rest of the world.
You use your thumb and your keypad, and you send a little text message that goes directly to the screen of another telephone.
Now, normally in the United States, we think of ourselves as ahead of everybody else.
I mean, we don't even give really much of a thought other than maybe when Sputnik went up and went around and we said, oh, my God, the Russians did it first.
We don't think about anybody else being ahead of us in these sorts of areas particularly.
But the truth of the matter is, isn't it, that if a lot of Americans were to go to Japan right now, they would be shocked at what the Japanese carry around with them.
I mean, there are some very practical reasons for that.
Constructing a wireline infrastructure, putting the copper in the ground or putting the fiber optics in the ground, that's a very expensive proposition.
It doesn't really pay to run it to a little village out in Africa or in India.
But you can create a little satellite station that can broadcast information inexpensively through wireless radio technologies.
Installing a wireless infrastructure in an entire country is a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time of building up a wired infrastructure.
And the handsets themselves, the devices, compared to a PC, for example, are far more affordable.
They're beginning to talk of disposable telephones pretty soon.
In the Philippines, the mobile device and the text messaging, that's really the poor person's internet.
And that, in fact, is where the government was overthrown.
One of the things that started me thinking about this was reading in the newspaper.
The president of the Philippines, Joseph Estrada, was accused of corruption.
There was a trial in the Senate there.
Like the Watergate hearings here 30 years ago, everyone in the Philippines was watching the television.
Suddenly, some senators associated with Estrada shut down the hearings.
Within minutes, tens of thousands of Philippine citizens began assembling in the square in Manila, all of them wearing black, because they had sent these text messages to each other saying, go to the square, wear black.
In a few days, millions of people showed up.
The military withdrew their support from the Estrada government, and it fell.
There were manifestos that they sent around.
If you can imagine manifestos written in 150-character chunks, We Are Generation text was what that famous manifesto said.
Well, you know, when the G8, the eight ruling economic powers, met in Canada, they were very afraid of something similar to what happened with the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
And, you know, of course, I'm, you know, I'm on computers all the time.
I've got like, I don't know, six computers in the house or something like that.
So I'm far gone.
And I get, you know, like, I don't know, 3,000 emails a day on average.
And I get about, I don't know, four or five Nigerian emails every single day.
And these are really classy emails.
These emails are always like from some government official in Nigeria who just happens to have about $60 million or $30 million that he doesn't know what to do with, and he's sends your account, you know?
It's a total BS thing, of course.
But I got tired of getting them.
And so, here, about a week ago, I finally answered one of them.
This one truly tugged at my heartstrings.
It was the untimely death of the late engineer C.G. Katelo Ono in Nigeria with his $30 million and his widow.
And, you know, she was all without money and having a hard time needing to get that money out of the country real fast and was going to give me a good part of it if I just let it come to my bank account.
I answered the letter and in a moment I'll have that and their response.
unidentified
The End.
End.
you you Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Music All right, so I get this message from the pathetic widow Ono that her husband has dropped dead.
I mean, you know, heart attack.
Dead.
$30 million.
Doesn't know where to put $30 million.
Approaching me on the part of her dead husband is some fellow named Patrick.
Not exactly a real Nigerian name, but hey.
Making me the offer, you know.
So I thought finally I'm going to write back to one of these.
And I wrote back to Patrick the following.
I said, my heart cries for poor Mr. Ono, who has died leaving all his money with no place to go.
My bank account would be a great place for it to, shall we say, hibernate.
I have my own money.
And I hope when I pass to the next world, there's someone as kind as yourself to handle my affairs, as you're doing for poor Mr. Ono.
What shall I do?
Yours truly, Arthur William Bell.
Well, here it comes back the answer, right?
Dear William Bell, first and foremost, how are you and the members of your family doing?
Thanks for responding to our proposal to you.
We highly appreciate it.
Kindly find below one more time for their details on how we are going to successfully accomplish this transaction.
We on our side here in Nigeria will on your behalf secure all the documents from the Federal High Court of Justice that will stand you as the next of kin to the late engineer CG Katak Ono.
This regard, the affidavit of trust will be backdated to suit the claim as it's sworn by the late engineer CG Kato Ono before his untimely death.
And it goes on and on and on.
And so they're going to backdate this sucker and they're going to send me $30 million and of course they're not.
Somebody here writes Rickett and Kimberly writes, Nigerian scam.
Don't let your bank account be part of Nigeria's third largest industry, Howard?
No, this is really something that apparently goes back decades before the internet.
They sent letters out to people.
I mean, one of the reasons I called this book Smart Mobs was I wanted to convey the idea that there are going to be opportunities and benefits, but every technology has pitfalls.
Information, misinformation, and disinformation.
Scams, crimes, terrorism, people who want to spam you, they are going to have their abilities amplified as well.
I'm really asking about a world in which we're going to have billions of people carrying devices thousands of times more powerful than even today's PCs, communicating at speeds tens of thousands of times more powerful, all linked together in various ways.
So every 20 minutes on the television, on the radio, go and demonstrate.
The other side, they only had the text messages, the cell phones, and the email.
So they were able, through their grassroots, to organize counter-demonstrations.
The point of this being that we're just seeing the first signs of a kind of decentralized collective action that emerges because we have a new way to coordinate our activities.
And that got me to thinking, well, we're seeing some other signs.
It's the end of the business model of the recording industry as we know it.
The Recording Industry Association is trying to protect not hundreds of thousands of musicians out there, but Brittany.
They've got four or five megastars that they put all their money into.
Less than 1% of the professional musicians in the U.S. make more than $600 in royalties.
I think that there are ways for musicians to make a living with this distribution system that could give us better music and more music and faster music.
Oh, yeah, I think there is already evidence that a great many people go out and buy CDs they wouldn't have bought otherwise because they can download the songs and try them out.
But Howard, as things get faster, as you get more storage now, you know, you can go get an 80 gigabyte hard drive for nothing now, $100 and something bucks.
That means that you can go on a certain news group, like Overnight if you want to, and you can download movies, Howard, entire motion pictures, sometimes before they come out of Hollywood.
I think there's a major difference, and I think that people are always going to want to go to this central place with strangers and sit in the dark and be immersed in this big screen experience.
And that that's not going to go away.
And you're going to want to have the multi-million dollar budget to have the big screen experience.
And there will always be a place for that.
You know, radio didn't go away when television came along.
It found a different niche.
You know, there is also SEVI at home.
Certainly your listeners must be aware of SEVI at home.
What's interesting about that, in the way that Napster put 70 million hard drives together, this put the computing power together, these 2 million computers, that's 20 teraflops of computing power.
Well, that's a very admirable side of the Internet.
There's no question about that.
I mean, information storage and processing and transfer.
But still, I'm not going to let you go on this other thing because the motion picture industry, the record industry, in fact, every form.
Now that we have digital everything, there's no more, at least with VCRs.
You know, one person would copy and you'd get a lousy copy and then somebody else would copy and get a lousier copy.
In the digital age, Howard, the original product is just as good after 17 people have pirated this thing as it was when the first person pirated this thing.
Very important for cancer research, for immune system research.
Medical researchers generally don't have the computing power themselves to tackle this.
So we have these peer-to-peer applications where millions of volunteers put their PCs together through the Internet.
If they shut down all peer-to-peer communication in order to save the recording industry and Hollywood's revenues, we may also stop that kind of research.
Now, I believe that we have a technology with micropayments in which it's possible for any musician to put out their music on the internet and say, I want to get a nickel for this, or I'm a name brand, I need to get a dollar for this.
And you can download it and make that payment at the same time.
It's a technology that would enable peer-to-peer to happen.
And yes, a lot of people will steal things.
A lot of people still steal things.
But I think more people, most people are fundamentally honest.
If it's easy and it's inexpensive enough, they will pay.
But the point is, people are able to put their computers together through the internet and do things that individuals could never do before, or even entire governments could never do before.
What's going to happen when the telephones we carry or even wear, I mean, it's not going to be too long before we're going to have wearable computers.
What's going to happen when we've got billions of these things communicating at speeds far beyond what the Internet does now?
Well, I think another way of putting it is if the Internet is controlled in a way that it has not before, will we see innovation springing up the way we have the last 20 years?
You know, the PC, as we know it, it was based on something that the Defense Department created and that IBM built.
You know, a 19-year-old dropout from Reed College, Steve Jobs.
Those guys, they made the PC.
It was the users who changed the technology, who created new ways to use the technology.
It really wasn't the traditional vendors.
With the Internet, we saw the same thing.
It was, yes, created by the Defense Department.
Yes, it rode originally on the network created by AT ⁇ T. But you could not create the World Wide Web by going out and telling a major corporation or eight major corporations to do it.
You need millions of people creating websites and linking them together, collective action.
I think that we need to be careful about whether we are going to give up the freedoms that we enjoy in order to preserve the freedoms that we enjoy.
What Poindexter is proposing is a massive surveillance mechanism that would scan all email, it would scan every website, the trail that everybody takes when they go to every website that they visit,
every purchase you make on your credit card, every time you go through one of those automatic toll collection booths, every time you turn on your cell phone and tell the cell tower where you are, that massive amount of information is going to turn computers loose on it to data mine to see whether there are terrorists.
Now, I think none of us want to have terrorists running around.
Well, again, the book I wrote was about a lot of opportunities that I see ahead and a lot of the pitfalls that I see ahead.
Smart mobs uses a word, mobs, that's a little edgy because not every group of people who coordinate collective action has socially beneficial ends in mind.
You've got totalitarian governments and terrorists.
you've got organized crime and you've got Nigerian scammers every time there's a new technology People were so unused to this technology that people could call them at home and toss them out of money.
Well, the smart has to do with the people's ability to coordinate their activities.
Now, of course, a smart mob is not necessarily a wise mob, and not everybody who coordinates their activities are going to have social benefits in mind.
And I think when we see political demonstrations in the future, they're not necessarily going to be democratic or nonviolent the way they were in the Philippines or in Venezuela.
But let me add another element here that I think that really raises the notion of carrying these devices around to a level beyond what we have with PCs and the Internet.
And that's the notion of a reputation system that might be able to tell you who you can trust to do something with.
And that's when the mob gets a little smarter.
We've got one of those already.
It's called eBay.
eBay, world's largest garage sale.
Yes.
Economists will tell you eBay is a market that should not exist.
Well, there's a problem that eBay solves, and the problem is this.
A buyer and a seller who have never met before, don't know each other, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, the person who sends the check and the person who sends the merchandise, they each take a risk that if they are the first one to move, the other person is going to stiff them.
That's right.
Classically, economists will tell you a market cannot exist under those conditions.
It does because if you're going to buy something, you can go check on the reputation of that seller and see what previous buyers have had to say about that seller.
And now, if you could extend that reputation system to this world in which we're carrying devices around, think of it.
You're surrounded every day in big cities by strangers, or you're in a train.
Some of these strangers, they may have common cause with you.
They may want to ride in the direction you're going, or want to buy something you have to sell, or may be a good candidate for a date on Saturday night, but you don't know who they are and whether to trust them.
What if you could say to your phone, I'm about to drive to my office now.
Who along exactly this route is looking for a ride exactly where I'm going, and they are guaranteed by someone I trust to be trustworthy.
It sounds a little far-fetched, but Napster's far-fetched, eBay is far-fetched.
So it may be, reputation is the lubrication of cooperation.
Groups of people who aren't related to each other are able to cooperate because there's some kind of trust mechanism.
Some threshold for trust has been lowered that enables them to deal with each other.
Markets spring into being.
The fact that you can go into a store and give someone a piece of paper instead of giving them three chickens and they will give you a can of soup, that means that we are using this symbolic communication system that we trust in some way.
I've got Charles in Hawaii, who all the way over there, over the water in Hawaii, is looking at your website, right?
Your web community, I guess you call it, right?
And apparently there's something up there about this diode energy system.
Now, I don't even know whether you're aware that it's on there, but a diode energy system is a radical claim made for free, essentially free energy.
And a little while ago, we were talking about toppling governments and stuff.
There's been a great, I don't know, myth, and maybe not a myth, in America that there are these free energy systems out there, but that all the big oil companies and the government, they squish them and they buy them and they suppress them and they keep selling their oil.
Well, one of these days, one of these systems, maybe not this one, who knows, that you've got on your website, but one of them is going to get out.
And then it's not going to just topple government.
A physicist in Switzerland thought it would be a good idea if you could link Internet sites together and just click on a link and see what's at that other Internet site.
Yes, I know.
In California where I live, there was one website not too long ago.
It was at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.
It spread through the web.
People downloaded the software, created websites, they downloaded browsers.
That's how it happens.
So here we have a technology that is kind of self-improving.
If there is somebody somewhere, some kid in Brazil, some physicist in Switzerland, some 19-year-old Harvard dropout in Redland, Washington, comes up with some new scheme, they can broadcast it and the whole technology upgrades itself.
9-11 was just kind of the last nail in the coffin.
I mean, there was some problem with the FBI before 9-11.
They were doing all kinds of things, and some of the things that they're meant to do, they weren't doing as well as they should.
Now we're seeing all kinds of super-secret agencies being set up that are able to use these technologies to track what people do.
So, you know, it used to be said that when you use your credit card, you leave a trail of electronic breadcrumbs that people can track.
Well, now when you were walking around with your telephone, and as I said, these devices are evolving, you're really broadcasting a sphere of electronic information.
It's intimate information.
It's about who you're talking to, where you are, what you're buying.
You know, even today, inexpensive global positioning satellite chips, they can locate a device to within a few feet now.
After 9-11, one of the largest mobile carriers in England is Virgin.
Virgin revealed something they had not told their customers.
They said that they had the records of all of the telephone calls that all of their customers had made and where those telephone calls had been made from.
So we now have devices that not only know who you are, but where you are.
Now, of course, I think this is, all technologies are double-edged swords.
Well, so do you either participate in this technology, sort of saying, all right, let me just sign off my Fourth Amendment rights here.
Give me my cell phone, give me my PDA, give me my 2GB laptop, and let me sign away Fourth Amendment rights.
Or else do you rebel and not participate and become one of the poor, the information poor, and then in reality the real poor too, because you won't have any money?
Well, suppose I made a case to you that if you, Howard Rungold, use PGP to send somebody a letter or an email across the country, maybe your publisher, what do I know?
And that that's a very anti-American thing to do because that'll make it hard on our Defense Department to decode the damn thing.
Our computers will get taken up and they're going to be looking for people who are doing bad stuff, but you're sending PGP over and they're having a headache with it and they're thinking, oh, what's this, you know?
Well, you mentioned the Fourth Amendment, and that's the one that the Founding Fathers put into the Constitution that said law enforcement should have the right to search and seize evidence if they have reasonable cause to believe that a crime is being committed.
And I think that's there's the problem.
Do we assume that all citizens are criminals in order to catch a few dangerous ones?
And if we do that, we will protect ourselves, perhaps, against dangerous acts.
You know, here's the irony, is that even if you had a perfect surveillance society, the limits of what any kind of police state can accomplish is the limits of what a human bureaucracy can do.
We had that FBI agent in Phoenix who said, wait a minute, we've got these kind of suspicious young Middle Eastern guys.
They're taking flying lessons.
I think we ought to watch them.
His superior didn't want to rock the boat.
So you could have the best surveillance in the world, but if you've got a plain old human bureaucracy, you're not going to be able to prevent disaster.
And I don't think that we've seen an improvement.
I don't think that this Homeland Security Department is necessarily going to improve the way human beings interact with each other.
They're going to have a lot of surveillance capabilities.
The fear, of course, is that they're not going to use them to stop terrorists, but to stop people whose politics don't agree with the politics of whoever happens to be in power.
Now, what, for example, would you imagine things would have been like if, let's say, Richard Nixon had had at his disposal the kind of system that's being lashed together right now?
What I think, we have the technical means for individuals to protect their privacy.
I think as these devices are designed, we can ask by law that there be a switch on them that gives you a privacy switch.
The law, the law enforcement authorities, they don't have a means to bypass that always.
But do we need to tell all the people who want to scam us, all the people who want to send us spam, where we are, who we are, and what we're buying?
I mean, you know, even on a simpler level, we may be at the end of the era where parents don't know where their kids are at all times, and people don't know where their spouse is at all times.
And that's going to make them for some significant social change.
You know, when we have the other element in the book is that I put together the mobile devices, powerful computers connected by wireless technologies, refutation systems.
There's another element, and that's that we're beginning to see chips with little radio circuits on it embedded in products and places.
So that these, you know, you see barcodes on everything already.
In fact, the Gillette manufacturing company announced today that they are buying 500 million, half a billion of these little chips.
They're called radio frequency ID tags to install on objects.
they're smarter than barcodes because they can sense the environment they can sense the environment they're implanting people now or is it with VeraChip or some company like that they're implanting people now with discounts to the first 50,000 people who get implants yes that's right so the generic name for this kind of environment is pervasive computing the the objects around us the places we go are going to have information embedded
and they're going to send information about the environment.
Again, I think as well as dangers, there are opportunities here.
You could take your telephone and say, I just got to town.
How do I get to Fifth and Main from where I am now, wherever that is, and get a little map?
And by the way, what's the crime rate at Fifth and Main?
What kind of businesses do they have at Fifth and Main?
Or point your telephone down the street and say, is there a good Chinese restaurant in this direction?
Or is there one that's recommended by Zagatts?
Or one that's recommended by my friends?
Or point it at a book in a bookstore and say, well, what does the New York Times say about this?
What does that Bell say about this?
And what does my bookstore in Iowa have to say about this?
Those are all possible today.
In fact, I had a remarkable experience about two weeks ago.
A friend of mine had taken a, you can buy a barcode reader,
about $150 and he connected it to a handheld PC that had a wireless connection on it internet connection on it and wrote a little code that connects the information you get from the barcode there's something called the universal product code database right tells you who manufactured it and what it weighs and what its ingredients are to Google the search engine tickling the tummy of the beast huh Howard?
Yeah, my friend had this pocket PC, little cheap barcode scanner, a little code that connected the information that you get when you scan something to Google, the search engine.
So I literally scanned the first object I found in this kitchen.
It was a box of prunes.
The name of the vendor came back.
It's called the Sun Diamond Growers Cooperative.
Never heard of them.
I Googled that name.
Anyone can do it.
The first two hits I got, the first one was U.S. versus Sundiamond.
It was a Supreme Court decision written by Anthony Scalia that had to do with their lobbying attempts with legislators.
What that was about, I don't know, but the second link was by a political advocacy group called Corp Watch that I won't forget the headline.
It was so surprising.
It says, bromide barons subvert democracy.
Well, it turns out that the vendors of this make about $700 million a year, and they are the leading lobbyists against controls on the substance methyl bromide on the local, national, and international level.
Whatever that means, it's not something you're likely to find on the label of a box of moons.
You were mentioning earlier reputations are going to be up there.
Well, it's really almost there now.
I mean, I can type in Howard Rheingold, or I can type in my own name, Marvell, and I guarantee you, every little tiny aspect of your life since this stuff has been recorded, it's all in there.
You go to Google, enter my name, you'll get thousands of returns.
Now, what's interesting about Google is unlike Yahoo, who first started kind of cataloging the web, when Yahoo started, they actually had groups of people sitting in rooms, going to websites, and deciding which ones were the most important.
Remember I talked a while ago about how you might be able to ask for people who are worth trusting to ride with you in a car.
Well, you could have an implicit reputation system where you could go see, well, which people have had people who have requested rides repeatedly, and which people only ride with them once.
And there is information we can glean not by asking what people say, but by looking at what they do, that can give us a more trustworthy picture than what people necessarily write.
So I think we're really at the beginning of only beginning to understand how these reputation systems work.
The stock market exists.
Money exists because a certain kind of reputation system, a certain kind of trust system was established at some point.
It hadn't always existed.
You really had to weigh your own gold coins at one point in order to trust that the currency you were using was worth what it said it was.
I think in the future, these devices that we carry with us might well give us important signals about who we can trust, who we might be able to team up with for five minutes or a lifetime, whether they are next to us or on the other side of the earth.
You know, that's where nation states came from.
We may see new forms of organization emerge.
I'm really trying to look at where we may be going in the future because I think we're moving there very quickly.
We have not yet seen the first viruses that travel through mobile devices.
What's going to happen when we become dependent on these devices that we carry?
They're powerful computers, they're highly connected to the web, and suddenly we're going to be getting weird viruses, weird worms on them.
You know, the most powerful worms may be the ones we don't know about.
What if, let's say, a government agency sent a worm out that went to everyone's hard disk, looked for certain combinations of words, sent those documents back, and then erased itself?
We live in a world in which, you know, we may be moving into a world in which nothing really quite works the way it's supposed to, and nobody actually knows why.
Some of it may be done on purpose, and some of it may just be an emergent property of all of this complexity interacting with itself.
You know, the spies may be discovering things that they didn't mean to discover, and people who don't mean to spy may be downloading information they're not meant to download.
When we've got chips in everything, and all those chips are communicating with each other, and we've got these teenagers who spend all day creating viruses, we have this kind of rich environment.
And I think that the Internet is more vulnerable than people think it is.
Recently, there's been these discoveries about the nature of networks like the Internet.
The Internet and other systems, the immune system, the ecosystem, the English language, they have certain characteristics, you know, the six degrees, the small world networks.
Yeah, but if we get a nation that is quickly, and we are, becoming absolutely, totally dependent on this, I mean, I heard the Prime Minister of Great Britain, it was years ago, who said, overnight, while you sleep, billions of dollars travel electronically.
They're bouncing off satellites.
It's moving around at the speed of light, billions of dollars across the world.
Well, you know, we've already seen a destabilization of the world economic system simply because so much money moves in and out of countries overnight, electronically.
Nobody really understands what's become of the world economic system.
What happens when we are able to extend our lives and alleviate suffering and cure diseases by having our biomedical condition monitored, connected to medical resources that can adjust our heart rate or our metabolism?
I think most people, given the opportunity, would take those technical measures to extend their lives.
What's going to happen when that system is threatened, becomes vulnerable, whether it's hackers bring it down or worms bring it down or simply the complexity of the system gives rise to some emergent phenomenon that no one predicted.
Well, what if we get artificial livers or kidneys?
People will accept these things.
And I think that we are increasingly vulnerable.
Our energy systems, our medical systems, moving just the amount of sewage out of a gigantic city like Sao Paulo or Tokyo or New York, those depend on technical systems.
Well, if you have listened carefully to what Al-Qaeda threatens, they understand how the economic structure of this country, of the world right now, is.
And I think they actually have a pretty good fundamental understanding of what it would take to bring it down, and they may not be wrong.
You need to have a billion-dollar chip manufacturing plant somewhere in the world connected to you in order to keep going, in order to get that electricity from the nuclear power plant.
Yes, I think if you want to be optimistic, you really have to look at the long run and the evolutionary process.
I think the printing press is a good example when literate populations emerged, instead of just a tiny elite, as it had been for thousands of years.
We got science.
Science is a collective enterprise that doesn't depend on a few geniuses.
It depends on a lot of people doing experiments and reporting the results.
Democracy emerged.
For the most part, I think most people would say, 500 years since the printing press, we're better off.
It didn't make war go away.
It made war more terrible for more people.
Poverty and injustice did not go away.
But I think over the long run, our societies have given more people more freedom, more health, more choices, more education than people ever had before.
So I think if we are able to survive this coming turbulent period, we will reach a phase where it will be possible for everyone on Earth to get enough to eat, to get sufficient health care.
What we have to do is to pass through a very dangerous period in which the power to destroy this rather fragile, complex civilization is vested not in a few nations, but in many groups.
What they've done is they've simply studied what the mean time to failure is for every part in a 747.
And they replace it before that mean time.
So you've got a system that's very vulnerable, but there is a way of dealing with that danger and with that vulnerability, and it works remarkably well.
You are in much more danger getting in your automobile and driving to the airport than you are in getting in a 747.
You know, an interesting thing about the fact that what we're carrying are control devices is that these 15-year-olds I was talking about, the ones who are very comfortable carrying these telephones around and sending text messages all over the world, 10 years from now, we know two things.
We know that the 15-year-olds are going to be 25.
They're going to be citizens.
They're going to be consumers.
They're going to be entering The workforce, they're going to be voters, and those devices that they carry are going to be thousands of times more powerful.
Now, a lot has been written about the baby boom generation and about how that solidarity worldwide of that age cohort was really shaped by the fact that baby boomers grew up with the medium of television.
And that television medium gave them a shared sense, a shared zeitgeist that gave them a connection with each other.
But the television medium is really a broadcast medium in which the viewer doesn't really have any control over us, over what is broadcast to them.
So if you have questions about this world we live in, technologically speaking, here we are.
unidentified
You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast A.M. from November 20th, 2002.
My life has been fine, but you don't eat too many things.
Coming in out of the rain, they hear the jazz pull down.
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We may forget your personal practice updates.
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Turing it out dog body!
all of you I cry all of you I cry baby please don't go when
I read the letter you wrote me you made me mad like mine when I read the words that you told me you made me cry cry cry I still love you though I can't let you go I love you oh baby I love you oh oh oh oh
oh every breath I take oh oh oh oh oh every move I make Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks.
I've got a lot of friends who said when computers came out and there shortly thereafter they'd never ever have one of those damn things in their house, not a chance.
So wearable community are people who wear devices that will connect them not only with computing power, but with others.
So not only could you query Google, but you could ask others whether they've got information, whether they've got something for you, what's on their playlist, what do they think is an interesting book or interesting music to read.
And you don't even need to make a social query, your device will talk to their device.
So you pass by somebody in the hallway, your device will look to their device and it will see, oh, this person likes a lot of the same kind of music you like.
What other music do they like?
What other books do they like that you might be interested in?
At the end of the day, you get home, you download your playlist, and you'll find, oh, gee, here are three songs and two books that I would probably be interested in.
So that's kind of the idea of the wearable community.
And there are actually some experiments in which people walk around wearing computers all day long, communicating with each other, doing this kind of comparison.
When you're out there on the road now, there used to be the feeling of, oh my God, freedom.
You know, I get to drive from the east to the west coast, maybe or wherever, and in between, I'm free as a bird.
I'm a trucker.
It's not true anymore exactly, is it?
unidentified
No, it's not.
And it didn't really bother me until I found out just how closely they monitored me.
I was unaware of the fact that, you know, every minute the truck is hooked up to the thing, they can pull it up and, you know, you left Chicago at 9.15 this morning.
9.16, you stopped at the rest area, and you were there for seven minutes.
You know, and you don't need to have a highway patrol car with a radar gun to detect whether you're speeding anymore.
With these GPS chips that locate you, all they need to do is do a simple computation of, well, you were at one place two hours ago, and you're 100 miles away an hour later.
You're a little bit too fast.
We're automatically going to find you and deduct the money from your accounts.
And then there are all the cameras at the traffic lights.
You go through a red light.
The camera takes a picture of your license plate, automatically recognizes the pattern of the numbers, looks it up in the database, and sends you a ticket.
You know, they're doing that with faces now, of course.
You've got millions of people who wear these computers.
These wearable computers, they're going to have cameras on them.
You could have not only governments, but private enterprises who would be able to contract with people to take a look at what they're seeing as they walk through the city.
You might be able to reconstruct a conversation between two people, neither of which recorded the conversation, simply by the people who walk by.
Well, you know, maybe they can do it in the back office, but they better not go out to a motel because the location of where their devices are is going to be tracked.
Of course, we're seeing it was revealed that in England a remarkable percentage of people had two telephones, one for their spouse and the other one for their lover, so that they don't call the wrong person at the wrong time.
People will always find a way to work around these things.
I find that the collection plan that the government has is so vast that I don't think that any individual American initially is their privacy is at risk.
But where I see the danger is the long-term collection of this information where if somebody makes even a one-time trip to a radical website or somebody borrows their phone or their computer and goes there and it's not really them even though it's registered in their name.
Or someone makes a call to a radio show like this and it's cataloged with a voice graft at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
And down the road, somehow their name comes up and they pull all of this old data and it's not like old paper that decays, yellows, and gets thrown out and burned.
These ones and zeros stay there forever.
And that is what I think is the dangerous mark, is that even a one-time lapse or a one-time curiosity by a college student, forever.
You know, ten years later, he's up for a promotion and somebody says, well, why did you visit that website?
That's not really in the mainstream of thinking today.
Do you know, I believe it may be Great Britain, but it's some country over there in Europe that two or three days ago said they're going to debate and perhaps put implant chips in child molesters, in people convicted of pedophilia, so that they know exactly where they are every minute of the day.
I've got a really good friend right now that works for a network.
Well, his network's being absorbed by another network, and this other network is going to begin to use computers, and in doing so, they're going to replace six out of ten people.
Ten people were doing the job.
Now computers are going to do it, and there's only going to be four people.
And you know what?
Those four people are going to be mostly sitting watching computers.
You know, throughout history, I mean, we used to have people digging ditches that are now dug by machines.
And I think most people would say it's probably humans can do better things than dig ditches.
It may be that we will look on some of the jobs that we do today from driving trucks to selling things at supermarkets as things that humans don't really need to do.
The question is, what should humans do if we're not driving trucks, we're not selling things in supermarkets?
That was all about whether the jobs that are going to be lost when they have new technology, whether those are going to be replaced by union jobs or non-union jobs.
So I think probably the biggest labor issue we face is what do we do with people who've been working all their lives and they're going to be replaced by machines.
So do you think that the government should be a big part of this re-education process?
inevitable I mean otherwise otherwise I think private enterprise has a huge stake in educating the workforce because But, Howard, private enterprise, for the most part, doesn't look past the next quarter in America.
They don't look past the next quarter.
In fact, people's jobs are coming and going about the next quarter.
I mean, you remember Henry Ford made his automobiles inexpensive enough that the people who made the automobiles could afford them.
We're going to see an age in which these highly technical enterprises, they're not going to have a workforce unless they sponsor education to some degree.
Because I think that the government and the taxpayers are at the limit of what we can do with public education.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More Somewhere in Time coming up.
If you are true to me, Oh, remember when you tell those little white lies That the night has a thousand eyes You say that you're at home when you phone me And how much you really care Though you keep telling me that you're lonely
I'll know if someone is there
All the times have come We'll put down and down Jesus don't feel the reaper
No, do the wind, the sun, the rain He can hear I say I'm Come on baby, don't feel the reaper Baby take my hand No, I feel the reaper Will be able to cry No, I feel the reaper Baby I'm your man La, la, la, la, la, la.
La, la, la, la, la, la.
Oh, my God.
You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from November 20th, 2002.
Boy, we have a racing across the river of technology tonight.
Howard Reinhold is my guest, and if you want to know more about all of this, he's written a bunch of books, the virtual community, let's see, virtual reality tools for thought, and now smart mods, and all of it, of course, at artbell.com.
If you go to rbell.com, you'll be able to follow the path to more information from his point of view on all of these subjects, artbell.com, and then tonight's guest material.
Just look down there and there it will be.
unidentified
Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
I want to keep raging through these telephone calls, if we can, but there is one thing that I want to ask you about.
Normally, Howard, now I'm speaking as a radio talk show host who sits here and lives and dies by telephones and telephone connections and all the rest of it.
And normally, when you get a technological advance, it's a better thing.
As a general rule, that would be true, wouldn't it?
Yeah, but before you really launch any further, what I'm talking about here is cell phones.
Now, that's right down your alley.
I mean, it's wireless city, but I've got to be honest with you, Howard, from my point of view, when I get somebody calling on a cell phone, Howard, it sucks.
It really sucks.
I mean, half the time they call, and, you know, it's like I know a cell phone call is coming because you pick up the phone, and the first thing you hear is, and they're gone.
And you wonder, I wonder who that was calling me on a cell phone.
And then when they finally do get through, Howard, you've got to listen to this, and despite commercials that say, can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
Fact of the matter is, half-time, you can't hear them because it's such a lousy connection and when I get them here on the air they sound like well the cell phones that is not people sound like crap howard just sound awful and to me in some ways the cell phone may be a step forward but it's also a big step in reverse they sound lousy yeah they do I think cell phone technology is pretty primitive well you notice that I say mobile devices and mobile phones because I think cellular
technology in which you've got these cell towers every few miles that take your signal from your device.
This is a transitional technology.
I think we're going to see, we are already seeing new wireless technologies emerge that are going to make it not only possible to have clearer and less expensive phone calls, transmit data at higher speeds, but it may be possible to do away with the network and entirely, in which the devices will simply route messages from one to another without going to some kind of central switch.
This, of course, scares the telephone operators tremendously.
I'm sure it does.
We're seeing a conflict between the new radio technologies and the old ways of regulating spectrum.
The FCC is really facing a war between new technologies and old business models.
And if you watch some of the news about the FCC and the radio spectrum...
You'll see that there's the vested interest in the cellular technologies and the technologies in which a company buys a portion of the spectrum, as does your radio broadcasting company.
That is being challenged by radios that are not as stupid as the old radios.
It's all based on the fact that the FCC was set up in the wake of the Titanic disaster when there were problems with interference to manage the airwaves on behalf of its owners, us, the citizens.
It turns out, though, that while they're doing this, they're investing all this money, they're servicing all this debt, the stock prices of these telecommunication companies have dropped.
It's unclear whether they're going to be able to afford to complete these networks, and at the same time, new technologies are emerging that allow the networks to grow from the ground up, from the users rather than the operators.
This is what they call Wi-Fi, or the little card that you put in your laptop that lets you get some wireless communications within a couple hundred yards.
A million and a half of these Wi-Fi cards are sold every month, and it's just starting.
We've got this grassroots communication network that's bringing up sort of the way the internet did, that's challenging these spectrum auctions.
The FCC, they're faced with these companies that have invested billions of dollars, and the government has taken in this money, versus new technologies that are thousands or maybe even millions of times more efficient.
So I have a chapter in Smart Mobs called Wireless Quilts that talks about some of the people who are challenging this.
You know, we have 450 sovereign nations within North America that are not governed by the FCC.
They're called Indian reservations.
And on those Indian reservations, it's hard to get telephone lines.
It's not cost-effective for the phone companies to run on there.
Some of these folks who are challenging these regulations are setting up new radio technologies on the Indian reservations, and we're going to see conflicts emerge there.
Did you know that if you take a wireless card with you and you go to a lot of airports, you can sit while you're waiting for a plane, you can surf the Internet, because they've got wireless inside the airport just for that?
then other times when i do uh get to a website and i try to you know uh sign on or maybe buy something i can't do it uh well that that is because um you need to have a cell phone that supports the the particular kind of software protocols That enables you to send secure information.
So when you try to buy something, you're using a somewhat different signal than when you are simply surfing to a website.
It's the secure communication protocol that enables you to buy things and be reasonably sure that somebody is not picking that signal out of the ether and putting your credit card number.
And so really that is for our own protection, because if you were to go into an airport and, for example, order over some sort of open system, well, that shouldn't be allowed.
And insurance companies, they know exactly how much fraud is going on out there and how much they need to charge for a premium to cover that.
So as long as the insurance companies are covering, I mean, after all, how many people go into a restaurant every day, they give their credit card to some teenager who takes it into a back room and disappears for 10 minutes?
You know, that's the point I've tried to make to some of my friends who say, I'll never buy anything on the Internet.
I'll never do it.
Well, you pointed out, once you've put that credit card in somebody's hand and they go into the back room to check it out, that's probably less secure than going over the Internet, isn't it?
No, speech-to-text systems are finally getting to the point where it's actually working, where you can talk to your computer and text will come out that's reasonably close to what you meant it to say.
You know, we're beginning to see inexpensive devices that illiterates can use to get health care information or information about employment or even learn how to read.
So I think we're beginning to see a breakthrough.
Now, this is going to make automobiles even more dangerous because people are going to begin getting their email in automobiles.
Well, you know, it's not, you can have your email read to you and then you can talk back to it and have that email sent off.
The point is not that you're reading the newspaper, like I see some people doing in traffic, but that you are distracted if you're using a cell phone or you are talking to it, even if it's a hands-off phone.
So that's one of the dangers, I think, of that technology.
But, you know, for someone who has tendinitis, who has physical problems, you can get systems today that will do speech-to-text.
I was wondering if you guys could respond to this question.
Do you think that the computer might be here for a spiritual purpose?
And what I mean by this is I believe humans most likely do have a latent in our DNA, the ability to have telepathic and telekinetic abilities.
However, in order to prepare us to be able to handle this, huge responsibility, I think the computer age may be here as a mechanism for training the human race to be able to handle this.
I mean you don't hand a four-year-old a loaded 45.
Well, you know, there may be a spiritual aspect to what's going to end up being, this is getting pretty far out, but believe me, Howard, I've had plenty of guests on this subject.
The integration of man with machine.
Specifically, the integration of man with computers and man then with the internet.
In other words, directly, instead of punching buttons with your finger, an intellectual direct connection between the human brain and a machine, Howard?
All of your information is kept in your registry, in your computer, and I have two concerns.
One is data mining to be narrowcasted so that any television show you watch, any radio station you listen to, whatever you do will be geared completely to you whether you want it to be or not.
You send out your message to a million people and hope that 10,000 of them are actually your audience.
Yes.
Advertisers would love to find out the people who buy liquor, who don't buy liquor, the people who need help walking, the people who don't need help walking, the ones who buy expensive cars, the ones who buy cheap cars.
Yeah, data mining our habits so that advertisements can be tailored to us.
In Smart Mobs, I describe a laboratory that IBM has in the San Francisco Bay Area.
They have billboards that have cameras on them.
So when you're at a point-of-sale display in a convenience market, the billboard is watching you.
It determines whether you're a man or a woman, what your race is, what your age is, and it displays an advertisement that's suited to who it thinks you are.