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What Does "Generative" Mean Anyway?

Today's Sunday New York Times included a column of mine in the business section which tried to think about the App Store's tremendous rate of innovation over the past two years, and the clear benefit it has had for small developers. My general point was that, while many of us have worked under the assumption that open platforms tend to be more "generative," in some important ways, the closed architecture of the App Store and the iPhone OS has actually contributed to the generativity of the platform.

On Twitter this afternoon, I got into a bit of a debate with Dan Gillmor, whom I have admired for many years now, about my use of the term "generative." Twitter is a fantastic medium for sharing links to complicated ideas, and an atrocious medium for actually discussing complicated ideas, so after a few volleys with Dan I told him I wanted to retreat to the blog. So here we are.

Dan's original tweet read as follows:

it's a flat contradiction to call a system generative, as @stevenbjohnson does, if it has a corporate choke point 

Now, both Dan and I are using Jonathan Zittrain, and his excellent book, The Future Of The Internet and How To Stop It, as a reference point for this concept of "generative." Zittrain's book is indeed about the power of open platforms that lack "corporate choke points," and generativity is inarguably crucial to his argument. But I don't think the two are synonymous. Or at least I don't think they should be synonymous.

In the opening chapter, Zittrain introduces the concept of generative platforms with a discussion of the Apple II: "[it] was a quintessentially generative technology. It was a platform. It invited people to tinker with it. Hobbyists wrote programs. Businesses began to plan on selling software. Jobs (and Apple) had no clue how the machine would be used. They had their hunches, but, fortunately for them, nothing constrained the PC to the hunches of the founders."

With the exception of that last clause (more on that later) all of these statements are true of the iPhone OS. (It is not true of the iPhone or iPad hardware, to be sure, as Cory Doctorow has emphatically pointed out.) As I argued in the column, the iPhone platform has seen more tinkering and new uses, generated by businesses and hobbyists alike, than any other two-year-old computing platform in history. (Including the Web, I would argue.)

In my mind, a "generative" platform translates to something like this: a platform that is constantly being re-invented in surprising new ways by a diverse group of creators, where individuals, hobbyists, small startups, and amateurs compete on a level playing field with large incumbents.

In other words, generativity is the result we are aiming for. An open platform is the tool we use to achieve that result. That's the central argument of Zittrain's book: if we want generativity in our media and software, then open platforms are the best way to achieve that goal. But if open platforms are part of the definition of generativity, then it suddenly starts to sound a little circular: the best way to achieve a generative open platform is to build a generative open platform.

What I was trying to argue in the Times piece is that the goal we're all championing—rapid, emergent innovation with small guys competing with big software companies—is happening on the iPhone platform, and it's happening in part because of the way that platform is closed, not open.

Now, that last clause: "nothing constrained the PC to the hunches of the founders." It is true that there is a very real constraint built into the App Store approval process, and in the column I specifically singled that out as the biggest problem with Apple's current system. But in practice, I would wager 99.9% of all new ideas get approved for the App Store, and so it is really more of a threat of a chokehold thus far. (Though I would still like to see a side door, as I wrote.) But of course these things all exist on a sliding scale. There are entirely open platforms that are entirely non-generative because no one develops for them. Apple's argument is that some restraints, implemented in the right places and judiciously used, can lead to more innovation in the long run. And right now, given the track record of the past 22 months, I think that's an argument that we have to take seriously.

Long Zoom Interview

PopMatters is running a long interview with me about my various books and projects, conducted by the excellent Jason Jones. One of the things that's great about this kind of conversation -- particularly when it's with someone as smart as Jason, and someone who has read your work closely -- is that you discover all sorts of things about your own work that you wouldn't have otherwise. Jason has a question here about the absence of Foucault -- one of my college idols -- in Ghost Map which I'm still mulling over.

But the most hilarious discovery for me comes at the very end of the interview. When I was writing my "Long Zoom" article about Spore for the Times Magazine, I had a vague suspicion that I'd used the phrase in a FEED article in sometime around 1999-2000. I searched through the FEED articles I have on my local hard drive -- I know, I know, I'm an idiot for not having the full FEED archives online -- but never found it. But then I read Jason's interview, and it begins with this quote from the closing pages of Emergence:

Imagine a kind of conceptual tracking shot of life two or three years from now, a movement from scale to scale—like the wonderful Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten... Only in our long zoom do we find, at each scale, the same behavior repeating itself again and again.

I think this is what happens when you've written five or more books on very different topics. It gets hard enough just keeping track of your own ideas, much less other people's.

I love this time-lapse video of FedEx planes arriving at Memphis during thunderstorms -- particularly when the storms finally center themselves squarely over the airport, and all the planes suddenly scatter. Reminds me of some ant foraging animations I've seen. It also looks frighteningly disorganized, like all the planes are individually coming up with a flight path on their own, though I'm sure that's not the case.

The Urban Web

I'm happy to report that I will not be talking about reality TV and Grand Theft Auto for a change on Tuesday night, when I deliver the keynote talk at the Summer Design Institute, sponsored by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Here's the formal description of the talk -- as you can see, it's open to the public for a mere $15. Should be a fun night, and it's being held in a beautiful building down at the very tip of Manhattan, right across from where our original FEED offices used to be.

July 12, 2005, 6:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m.

Please join us for a keynote address by Steven Berlin Johnson, bestselling author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Mr. Johnson will address how the design of social spaces in interactive environments is based on the translation of metropolitan values, or the "value of sidewalks," building on the intelligence of great cities and neighborhoods.

A book signing and reception will follow.

Johnson's talk is a part of Summer Design Institute, a week-long program for educators and designers. The event features workshops, studio visits, keynote presentations, and advisory groups that connect the school curriculum with the world beyond the classroom. Attendees join an international roster of renowned designers and design educators as they share strategies for engaging K-12 students in the design process. For more information about Summer Design Institute, please visit www.summerdesigninstitute.org

Event Location:
The National Museum of the American Indian
Smithsonian Institution
1 Bowling Green
New York City

Price: FREE for Summer Design Institute participants and Museum members; $15 non-members; $10 students and seniors.

Boozy

I had the great pleasure last night of watching one of the last performances of Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification Of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses. I don't really know all that much about the theater, so perhaps Boozy belongs to an existing genre that I'm just not aware of, but it struck me as a pretty amazing hybrid form: a serious look at the clash between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, and thus between master planning and sidewalk-centric urbanism, all conveyed through the form of a genuinely hilarious mock musical comedy. There are stirring Broadway anthems about single-use zoning, if you can imagine such a thing ("Put the people with people/Put the business with business"), as well as a number of not-so-subtle references to Emergence: the Jacobs character gives an impassioned rant about slime mold at one point, and at the end she and her followers start chanting "Emergence! Emergence! Emergence!" while the Moses camp shouts: "Get it done! Get it done!"

I had drinks with some of the creators afterwards and told them that I hoped the show would find another run somewhere -- it's been totally sold out from day one. If it does make another appearance, I'll try to mention it here.

Emergence And Exploding TV

I've been enjoying Chris Anderson's and Jeff Jarvis' fascinating thoughts on "Exploding TV" over the past few days -- can't wait for Chris' Long Tail book -- and so this morning I went back to look at the passages that addresses this issue in Emergence. One of the funny things about writing more than one or two books is that you very quickly get to a point where you really can't remember what you wrote a few years before -- there's a vague sense of the topics, but the specific points are quite blurry. So it's always interesting to go back for a refresher course, particularly when you're writing in futurist mode. Here's more or less what was in the book (this is from my final Word version, not the printed text):

But TiVo and Replay -- and their descendants -- will also fall under the sway of self-organization. By 2005, not only will every television set come with a digital hard drive -- all those devices will also be connected via the Web to elaborate, Slashdot-style filtered communities. Every program broadcast on any channel will be rated by hundreds of thousands of users, and the TiVo device will look for interesting overlap between your ratings and the larger community of television watchers worldwide. You'll be able to build a personalized network without even consulting the channel guide. And this network won't necessarily follow the ultra-personalization model of the "Daily Me." Using self-organizing filters like the ones already on display at Amazon or Epinions, clusters of like-minded TV watchers will appear online. You might find yourself joining several different clusters, sorted by different categories: retirement home senior citizens; West Village residents; GenXers; lacrosse fanatics. Visit the channel guide for each cluster, and you'll find a full lineup of programming, stitched together out of all the offerings available across the spectrum.

Despite the prevailing conventional wisdom, the death of the network programmer does not augur the death of communal media experiences. If anything, our media communities will grow stronger because they will have been built from below. Instead of a closed-door decision on West 57th Street re-branding CBS as the "Tiffany Network," a cluster of senior citizens will form organically, and its constituents will participate far more directly in deciding what gets top billing on the network homepage. To be sure, our media communities will grow smaller than they were in the days of "All In The Family" and "Mary Tyler Moore" -- but they'll be realcommunities, and not artificial ones conjured up by the network programmers. There will still be a demand for entertaining television content -- perhaps even more of a demand than there is today. But it will be distributed over a wider pools of shows, and the networks won't be able to force that demand on us by positioning shows in prime time spots. The shows themselves will remain top-down affairs -- the clusters won't be choosing the ending of this week's Frasier by popular vote -- but the networks those shows find themselves aligned with will come from below. They'll be created by footprints, not fiat.

The entertainment world will self-organize into clustersof shared interest, created by software that tracks usage patterns, and collates consumer ratings. These clusters will be the television networks and the record labels of the twenty-first century. The HBOs and Interscopes will continue to make entertainment products, and profit from them, but when consumers tune in to the 2005 equivalent of The Sopranos, they won't be going tuning into HBO to see what's on. They'll be tuning in to the "Mafia stories" cluster, or the "urban drama" cluster, or even the "James Gandolfini fan club" cluster. All these groups -- and countless others -- will point back to The Sopranos episode, and HBO will profit from creating as large an audience as possible. But the prominence of HBO itself will diminish: the network that actually serves up the content will become increasingly like the production companies that create the shows -- a behind-the-scenes entity, familiar enough to media insiders, but not a recognized consumer brand. You'll enjoy HBO's programming, but you'll feel like you belong to your clusters. And you'll be right to feel that way, because you'll have played an important role in making them a reality.

Think of the media world as a StarLogo simulation. It begins with a perfectly ordered grid, like an aerial view of Kansas farmland: each network has its lineup in place, each radio station has its playlist. And then the convergence waves washes across that world, and eliminates all the borders. Suddenly, every miniseries, every dance remix, every thriller, every music video ever made is available from anywhere, anytime. The grid shatters into a million free-floating agents, roaming aimlessly across the landscape like those original slime mold cells. All chaos, no order. And then, slowly, clusters begin to form, shapes emerging out of the shapelessness. Some clusters grow into larger entities -- perhaps the size of small cable networks -- and last for many years. Other clusters are more idiosyncratic, and fleeting. Some map on to the physical world ("inner-city residents"); some are built out demographic categories ("senior citizens"); many appear based on patterns in our cultural tastes that we never knew existed, because we lacked the tools to perceive them ("Asian-American Carol O'Connor fans.")...

In the end, the most significant role for the Web all of this will not involve its capacity to stream high-quality video images or booming surround sound; indeed, it's quite possible that the actual content of the convergence revolution will arrive via some other transmission platform. What the Web will contribute will be the meta-data that enables these clusters to self-organize. The Web will be the central warehouse and marketplace for all our patterns of mediated behavior, and instead of restricting those patterns to the invisible gaze of Madison Avenue and TRW, we'll be able to tap into that pool ourselves to create communal maps of all the entertainment and data available online. You might actually have the bits for "The Big Sleep" sent to you via some other conduit, but you'll decide to watch it because the "Raymond Chandler fans" cluster recommended the film to you, based on your past ratings, and the ratings of millions of like-minded folks...

How does it hold up? (This was written at the very end of 2000, I believe.) First, it's interesting to see the total confidence in the Tivo model: it just seemed inevitable that TVs and hard drives were going to converge, and converge quickly. Certainly we're further along than we were five years ago, but the adoption rate has been much slower than I imagined.

It's also interesting to see the emphasis in my language on ratings and recommendations. That's ultimately not so different from what Jeff and Chris and others have been talking about, but you can see clearly that the underlying model has shifted in the past few years: the three self-organizing tools that had really impressed me in Emergence were Slashdot's Karma-based quality filters (which involved rating individual posts), Amazon's recommendations, and eBay's trust ratings. But Jeff and Chris are writing about Exploding TV as a continuation of the blogging explosion: so it's not so much about ratings as it is people and conversations.

The idea of the cluster, too, shows the extent to which I was influenced by group weblogs like Slashdot more than individual blogs, though of course Blogger was around and growing at a nice clip even then. I was trying to make the point that the future was not going to be a purely personalized Daily Me -- that there would be real communities forming out of this new information system. But perhaps the reality will prove to be slightly more Daily Me than I imagined, if your Tivo playlist is just a personalized RSS feed for video.

But on the whole, I wasn't too far off the mark, I'd say. (I'm curious to hear how the passage reads to others.) It's a nice use of the blog format for authors to go back and fact check their past predictions. (It's also useful for pulling something out of the dead trees format and into live circulation in the blogosphere.) Perhaps I'll try to track down a passage from Emergence or Interface Culture where I got something totally wrong, and we can all have a good laugh at my expense.

The Other California Story

I told you I might not show up here for a few days, and sure enough it's been almost two weeks. Feels like about three months, mainly because my trip to California was so intense. I was out there for a five day small retreat on the topic of "Emergence and the Evolution of Consciousness" -- part of the Evolution series being hosted by the Esalen Center for Theory and Research. Esalen, in case you haven't heard of it, is the now 40-year-old commune/spa perched on a cliff over the Pacific. It has a reputation for New Age zaniness, but I had an absolutely exhilarating time. It doesn't hurt that it was literally the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life. The first night I was there, I wandered out with a glass of red wine after the others had gone to bed, and discovered that there was a near-full moon setting over the ocean. Then I noticed that there were stairs heading down from the deck of the house we were staying in. I followed them down in the moonlight, and they led to a smaller area almost cantilevered out over the surf fifty feet below. (The whole process felt a bit like playing Myst.) I sat and watched the moon for about thirty minutes -- it seemed almost incomprehensible that I had awakened that morning in Brooklyn, and somehow was ending it in this magical spot. Each night I'd return to my little discovery -- I took a picture during the morning of the last day to remember it by. Not bad, huh?

The conference was as energizing as the place itself. There's something intrinsically fascinating about putting a ten or fifteen super-smart people in a shared environment for a few days: letting them do formal presentations, but also riff over dinner or early morning coffee. It's amazing not just for the ideas, but also in seeing the different styles of thinking -- each mind a little different from the next. I got to meet some people whose work I've always admired from afar -- complexity-theory god Stuart Kauffman, Symbolic Species author Terry Deacon, the Global Business Nework's Jay Olgivy, astrophysicist Dave Deamer, Esalen's founder Michael Murphy, among others -- and I made some new connections that feel like they might last for decades. It was also very moving to see hear how many people had been inspired by reading Emergence, even in a crowd that had been thinking about complex systems for far longer, and with far more rigor, than I ever have.

My only regret is that this poor little blog was so deserted for the last ten days. Fortunately, the comment spammers were keeping the site active while I was gone. I've particularly enjoyed the "free Viagra" conversation -- thanks to all of you who so generously contributed to the site. I hope all your underage teen photo sites are thriving!

Darwin In A Box

My latest "Emerging Technology" column is the lead story over at the Discover site. It looks at how genetic algorithms -- Darwin in a box, as the title calls them -- are being applied to solve real-world tasks. I wrote about GAs a little in Emergence, but the stories there were more proof of concept than practical application. In the column I talk about an amazing GA designed to teach a virtual character how to walk (a demo of which I first saw at the wonderful TED conference earlier this year.) But one of my favorite bits in the piece comes from a conversation I had with the always interesting Bill Gross:

Genetic algorithm advocates often talk about their software in the language of ecosystems: predators and prey, species and resources. But Gross has another idea –– less rain forest and more assembly line. "Let's say you give the software access to the entire McMaster-Carr industrial supply catalog. They have 400,000 parts in stock: screws, bolts, hinges, everything. So you've got the whole gene pool of those parts available." Somewhere in that mix is the machine you're dreaming of, and simulated evolution may well be the fastest way to find it.

"You state your objectives, let the thing evolve with the optimum combination of parts at the lowest price, and the machine will be there this afternoon," Gross says, his voice rising with excitement. "That's an extreme exaggeration –– but not that extreme!"

Operation Desert Swarm

Treating war like a videogame is generally considered to be a sign of simulation society degradation, but in today's USA Today, Kevin Maney makes the case for why the US war planners could have learned a thing or two from The Sims, by seeing the Iraqi system as more decentralized, and less vulnerable to "decapitation" than it initially appeared. The argument will be familiar to Emergence readers, and in fact there are a few nice shout-outs to the book and a couple of quotes from me. (Once again, I'm partially responsible for injecting discussions of ant colonies into a context where they are usually not invoked.) I think Maney is on to something here. Given Hussein's no-show at his own speech yesterday, it's becoming entirely possible that 1) he's been dead the whole time, and 2) the Iraqi forces nevertheless managed to fight more fiercely than we expected, despite the fact that the command-control centers have been devastated by the air campaign. It's well known that Saddam likes to style himself (and his statues) after Stalin, but maybe he's been learning a few swarm warfare moves from Osama over the past decade.

We are not ants!

In the past few weeks, Joi Ito has launched a fascinating online "happening" around the topic of "Emergent Democracy," looking at ways in which the information and social networks of the digital world could create new forms of participatory political systems. He's written up a superb overview of the topic, and you can browse a number of interesting followup discussions here and here.

Part of me is thrilled that Emergence has played a small role in triggering this whole discussion, but I'm also feeling a little guilty, since apparently quite a bit of time has been spent debating the seemingly obvious question of whether human beings are ants or not. (If you haven't read the book, ant colonies are used throughout as an example of self-organizing, bottom-up behavior.) Of course, it could be worse: we could be slime mold!

The objection revolves around the fact that humans are both more nuanced than ants in their assessments of the world and their decision-making capacity, and that they're capable of understanding the dynamics of the larger system in ways that ants cannot. As Adina Levin says, "The atoms of ant action are simple: pick up crumb, bring crumb to ant colony. The atoms of human action are more complicated: identify people and groups interested in opposing Total Information Act, encourage people to persuade local congressperson."

I think there's a lot of validity to the distinction, but I still think there's value in thinking about ants in this context. To me, when you're talking about emergent democracy in the online world, the equivalent of the ant is not the individual human, it's the software. The atoms of human action are indeed incredibly sophisticated ones, but the atoms of software that enables those actions to connect in new ways are much simpler. It's more like: "follow this link, connect this page to other pages that share links, look for patterns in the links." The decision-making process that leads one human to link to another person's page is indeed more complex than the instinctual actions of ants following pheromones, but the decision of the software to manipulate those links, and learn from them, is much more like the way ants behave ---- or at least it could be, if we choose to build it that way.