INTERVIEW:
Question 1
First of all, what does being "digital" mean?
Answer
Well, in simple terms it's actually a way of living. It's not scientific, it's not
technical, and it's not theoretical. It's very real and it's something that children
around the world understand perfectly well; it's just adults that don't know anything
about it.
Question 2
So what can we say to the adults
Answer
We have to say to the adults: first of all, learn from your children, which is something
which is a bit of a change for many people. But it really has to do in my opinion with the
difference between bits and atoms, namely, that we go from a world that is very material,
that is made of things we touch, that have weight, to a world where there are no borders,
for example. It is by definition global. Bits - these little ones and zeros - travel at
the speed of light, they have no colour, they have no shape. And it's in fact a very
interesting, new, and for some people even a frightening world, because the change is
enormous.
Question 3
Is the future of bits something that will bring people closer or will it make a
gap between people who are digital and people who are not, who don't want to become
digital?
Answer
In the end it will have a very harmonising and uniting effect. There's no
question about it. But first we are going to have a generational divide. The
information-rich and the information-poor won't be the normal economic divide that we're
accustomed to like rich and poor economically, but it really will be that the young people
will be in the know and the older people won't. And they'll think that they won't need to
know because they've managed all their life without it, so why do they have to start now?
And they're wrong, and it will take about 4 or 5 years for that gap to close. When that
gap closes, then we will find the other gap, the economic gap, where there really are
developing countries or poor people in developed countries, and that gap will close in
maybe another 4 years because we'll see much, much lower telecommunications costs, much,
much lower computer costs, and so then that gap will close.
Question 4
What should an old man do in the meantime?
Answer
Get a child. Seriously. I get about 10 pieces of electronic mail a day from grandparents -
because people of 55 and older in the United States are per capita the fastest group to
get on-line - who tell me that they've got their granddaughter and they went out and they
bought a laptop computer and they connected to America On-line, and it has really changed
their lives and their relationships with their grandchildren. It's a very interesting
phenomenon.
Question 5
What did the visionary in you see 20, 30, 10 years ago? Exactly why did you found
MEDIALAB. What did you see in the possibilities of a new world? What was the vision?
Answer
Well, I founded the MEDIALAB as a counter-culture to computer science at the time, with
two particular principles: the first being that I was interested in how people
communicated with machines, the interface. If you're a machine and I'm a person, how do I
interact with you and how can I make a machine more like you, more like a person? That was
principle number one. And principle number two was: how would the information content,
namely, the subject - whether it's news, music, or a theatrical video production, or it's
story-telling, all these different kinds of content - how would the content effect the
technology and the channel of communication? Those were the two driving forces in August
of 1978 when we had the idea to build the MEDIA LABORATORY.
Question 6
What was your vision of a new world? And what is different in the new world?
Answer
Again, vision is not a word that we use very much because we're not theoretical. We don't
write papers. In fact, I'm very embarrassed to have written a book because a book is a
very old fashioned medium and that's really not the normal futuristic mode of expression.
But we build things and the line or the phrase that is often used at the MEDIALAB is that
the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And so there are about 300 people now
who are really building things and trying things - not writing theories or papers about
them, but building them.
Question 7
What have been the most important inventions of the MEDIALAB that are in use now or will
be in use very soon?
Answer
I think in general multimedia is something that came out of the MEDIALAB and the
predecessor groups. There are lots of specific examples I could give you, but I think the
most important result is that people are now paying attention. You have to understand that
when we started the MEDIA LABORATORY people thought this was joke, they said these are
charlatans. The word charlatan was used in the newspapers, These people are all show, they
have no substance, there's no depth to this. It's just Hollywood. And in fact there's a
great deal of depth, in fact there's so much depth, there's a trillion dollar industry out
there and I believe something like the Internet is such a profound change, now that it's
being generally accepted, that it's probably more important than the printing press.
Question 8
Do you think that the Internet will stay as it is, which is a sort of grass roots movement
that develops by itself or that it will be bureaucratised in the future? Will people get
hold of it, other companies get hold of it, start paying higher prices to be on-line or
whatever?
Answer
Well, I've been on the Internet for 25 years. Let's remember where it came from because it
was the Department of Defence in 1969 that launched the idea of building the Internet. And
the very basis of the Internet as a fail-safe communication system has created a totally
decentralised structure. And at first, people like myself were allowed to use it in 1970
and 1971 for personal reasons, for technical reasons, it was a very closed community. But
when it grew and then went into NATO countries and got bigger and bigger, it grew with the
same decentralised structure that it had at the beginning. So it is by definition grass
roots; nobody can control it. A government cannot even step in and say: I'm going to
control it. If we decide we're going to stop it, you can't even stop it. What are you
going to stop? Are you going to pick up a manhole cover and cut some wires? It is a
totally decentralised phenomenon. It's unstoppable, and by definition it's a grass roots
phenomenon.
Question 9
I believe that you have written or you have said that the revolution that is happening now
is beyond politics, beyond politicians, and the capability of people to control what is
happening, its the course of nature, just making it's own way. Is this so? And does this
mean the impossibility of controlling the dark side of the digital revolution?
Answer
You have to remember that the lack of central control doesn't mean chaos and anarchy. Many
people think the only form of order comes from a central authority. That's not true. One
of the examples that we use frequently at the MEDIALAB is ducks. When ducks fly south,
they make this nice "V". And the front duck is not leading. And - I don't hunt -
but if you shoot the front duck, another duck becomes the front, and that wasn't the Vice
President Duck that just became the President Duck, but that each duck is behaving
autonomously, and together they create this order. That's exactly the way the Internet
works. There's no President Duck and there's no Vice President Duck. So politics are quite
irrelevant, because politics are by definition something in the nation-state, and so at
that level there's just no role. They really don't play a serious role. They can stop the
bit, in the sense of slowing it down, they can speed it up, but fundamentally, the
government has no real role except to get out of the way.
Question 10
So how will politics change in the era of post-information, in the era of
telecommunication?
Answer
Well, again, politics, if you want to call it that part of government, will do two things.
It'll get global and more local. I think this will be a phenomenon that will apply to the
media. It will apply to companies, it will apply to many phenomena. In some sense the
nation-state is almost exactly the wrong size. It's not global and yet it's not local
enough. So you're going to see a flourishing of both ends of the spectrum. And there will
be an automatic globalism and there will be some very new forms of localism.
Question 11
One of the most used expressions of the past decade was the "global village". Is
the digital revolution going to lead to the global village or will it turn into something
else?
Answer
The global village is a nice expression. I'm not sure Marshall McLuhan understood it to be
what it's turning out to be, but I think that it aptly describes what's already happening.
And if you look at the 50 million users currently on the Internet, you have to remember
that over half are outside of North America, so this is not an American phenomenon.
Sometimes in Europe people look at the Internet as a new kind of American imperialism,
like soap operas or movies that are exported. But the world-wide web was invented a few
miles from Milan ! It's a European phenomenon and it's an example of where people really
do collaborate, and they don't care at all about the normal frontiers and boundaries. Bits
don't stop at customs; they go right through.
Question 12
Television. We look at the satellite, you check out the world and basically you find out
that the formats are the same for everybody, that it's almost just a replication of
formats all over the world. Now will the Internet, and the expansion of the information
network all over the world, make the world even more homogeneous, more equal, or will it
maintain the differences that are natural to the world?
Answer
Let's understand the difference between the Internet and television because there's a very
fundamental difference. Television is like newspapers, it's like radio, it's like books,
where there is a source and from that source, whether it's coming from a satellite or it's
going through cable or it's terrestrial broadcast, is distributed and that is a
hierarchical system. There is a President Duck, and if you want to stop that television
program, you remove the President Duck, and that's the end of the program. The Internet
isn't like that at all. It's a lattice where any point can be both a transmitter and a
receiver. And because of that it will in fact improve the differences, and by that I mean
allow them to flourish as opposed to getting a more homogenised, single view of the world.
And the differences, which are the most interesting part of life anyway, will in fact
flourish, not be hammered out. In the old days of analogue television and other techniques
we had to follow certain standards which gave this homogeneity, which is no longer true.
Question 13
I believe that among the projects of the MEDIALAB there is also a way to make more space
for TV channels or transmission. Is this true? We are going to have the possibility of
having a million channels or anyway many more channels than there are now. What are we
going to put on all these channels? And who is going to pay for the production of all
these TV channels?
Answer
The question of channels isn't a matter of turning 10 channels into 100 channels or into
1000 channels. That's not the right way of thinking about it. You really are going to have
one channel. Each person will have one channel but that channel will be the channel they
want. Now in the channel you want there's going to be a mixture of material. If for
example it's a sporting event, then I would expect very professional people like RAI to go
out and record and transmit that sporting event. But if for some reason I'm interested in
a couscous recipe, then it might be actually a housewife in Morocco who is running a file
server that has really the best couscous recipes. The production value in the cinematic
sense might not be very good, but it will be exactly the right piece of information for
that time. So you've got to think that it's really a mixture of that kind of communication
with very, very high production values.
Question 14
Aren't we going to need, though, a sort of telephone book, a reference, to find what we
need among the million sources? Won't we need somebody to help us look for these things?
Answer
Yes. And it's not a telephone book or TV Guide with 10,000 pages in it for each week.
You're going to have in the future what we've come to call agents. These are computer
programs that literally live on the network and look for things for you. In some sense
it's like visiting a city you've never been to, but you're going to send to the city in
advance 3 or 4 of your very best friends who are going to go around exploring things on
your behalf. That kind of thing will happen on the Internet. And so you'll get
personalised television and you'll get personalised music and personalised newspapers that
come from those agents, not necessarily reading a telephone book of potential program
material.
Question 15
Children are very close to the new media because they are very young and very receptive.
At the same time some parents may fear that their children or grandchildren will not play
with toys or with earth or with elements, physical elements, but will spend half of their
life in front of a monitor. Is that going to be so?
Answer
You know there's an interesting phenomenon. If the child today spends half of their time
reading books, the parents say bravo. OK. So clearly that's bad too, spending half of your
day reading books instead of going out and playing with children. The difference is that
we have found, and it's very, very real, that children who spend a lot of time on the
Internet come away with much better social skills. They actually play better, they
communicate with other children better. The Internet is not like the Nintendo twitch games
where you're just sitting there mesmerised. It's a socialising phenomenon. And all the
evidence exists that it increases, it doesn't decrease socialisation.
Question 16
Are multinational companies going to get hold of all this. Will Time-Warner, Bertelsmann,
the big companies which deal with all that we're talking about, be going to control our
future world?
Answer
No, big companies are not going to control the Internet. Big companies will be on the
Internet and they will serve a valuable purpose, but the interesting thing about the
Internet is that it makes little companies, in fact, individuals multinationals
instantaneously. They have a global market even though they are only 2 or 3 people in this
little company. On the other hand, if I'm on the Internet and I want to get information
about a company there are many ways I can get it and I can probably get it free, but I
would much prefer to pay a few pennies or dollars to the Financial Times or to Dow-Jones
or to somebody to get that information, because as a multinational with a brand name it's
more reliable and I'm going to pay for the branding of the information. So both will
coexist. There will be the Bertelsmanns and the Time-Warners and the Dow-Joneses, but the
new entrant, the new competition for a company like RAI will be the small companies or
individuals or maybe individuals spread all over the world and 3 or 4 different time zones
collaborating and being an information provider but in a very narrow channel.
Question 17
How do you see the future of television in a place like Europe? We have some referendums a
few days away in which we are going to vote if Berlusconi, who has 3 private channels
against the 3 state channels of RAI, can hold onto his channels or has to give away a few
or anyway it's a matter of antitrust. Now, how do you see the problem of antitrust and
television in Europe, and elsewhere? What is going to happen?
Answer
I don't think of television as a separate medium. I think of all of these media as bits.
And if you have bandwidth, like RAI or Mr Berlusconi, the question is really the
allocation of that bandwidth when you use terrestrial broadcast. But once you use fibre,
there's no bandwidth question anymore. So the temporary question is bandwidth, which I
don't think is an important one because it's so short term. The long term question is
bits.When you broadcast television. you broadcast a lot of bits. In fact if you want to
take what we're looking at right now, it would take about 5 million bits per second -
that's a lot of bits - every second being pushed out into the ether. You might decide all
of a sudden you don't want to push television out, you want to push an edition of the
newspaper. But an entire newspaper only has in it about 20 million bits, 25 million bits,
it depends how many pictures there are, but let's say there are very few pictures and it's
something like the Wall Street Journal. That's not very many bits, that's only a few
seconds of transmission. So if you look at them as bits, and not as television or radio or
anything, then the big thing that has to change isn't the allocation of spectrum but it's
the cross-ownership laws. We have to get rid of the cross-ownership laws, namely that you
can't own a newspaper if you own a television or you can't own a television if you own a
newspaper.
Question 18
So where is antitrust in all this?
Answer
Antitrust is a centralist problem. As soon as you have a centralist model of the world
you're going to have an antitrust problem, because you have a pie and you want to make
sure it's cut up in an equable fashion. In a decentralised world you don't have the same
antitrust problems. They go away. Now unfortunately, you just can't instantly deregulate,
because what you have to do is repair the damage that was done, not just create a free
market. But eventually the free market is going to prevail and there won't be any
regulatory control, and there shouldn't be any.
Question 19
Back to Internet. The use of Internet is changing people's habits. Some people don't go
out anymore, and the difference between Sunday and Monday or between night and day is
reduced. Is this going to be our future days without time?
Answer
First of all there's this myth that the Internet is creating anti-social people who don't
go out and don't have a life, well that's ridiculous. It turns out the exact opposite is
true. In fact, you are a prisoner of Monday to Friday and night and day and weekends. I
don't care about Sunday anymore than Monday, I don't care about night anymore than day. In
fact, I'm so personally independent of space and time that it doesn't really matter where
I am. I find that that is much more a form of freedom than a form of oppression. If you're
making hamburgers or you're a brain surgeon, you have to be with the brain or the
hamburgers. You can't be travelling around and using the Internet because we don't know
how to turn hamburgers into bits and back into hamburgers yet-some day we'll do that. In
terms of the daily life, the notion that we're living in a cocoon and people are going to
be sitting in solitude at the terminal is absolutely ridiculous because first of all
they're not in solitude, they have 50 million people they're talking to, and second, it's
a form of freedom not to have to follow a schedule, that normal sort of business hours
when we all have to be in the same place. It's totally artificial. There are companies in
Italy, who work on the Internet, who actually expect their employees to come to work
everyday and don't like them doing work at home. That is such an old fashioned mindset
that it's extraordinary. It's not digital.
Question 20
Back to my first question. The world is going to be digital, is there not going to be a
dark side to all this, given that we are humans and we know that humans of men are made.
You don't see any chance of negativity in all this?
Answer
The dark side, the chance and the already practised dark side of the Internet in my
opinion has to do with security and privacy. And this is a subject that we have to take
very seriously and we have to work on it. Security and privacy comes in 3 forms: when I
communicate with you, you first of all want to know it's me. OK, so that is to
authenticate that it's really me. When I send you a message, the second thing is you don't
want somebody to be listening in. That's the second piece of security and privacy. The
third piece is when you store it on your disk at home, you want to make sure nobody
afterwards is coming in and pulling it off. All 3 forms are very important. Having one and
not the other two doesn't make sense. We need all three of them because otherwise you
really do risk what I would call a very dark side where you risk people listening in,, and
whether it's as benign as marketing information or as, you know, as unsavoury as the
government sort of snooping, a Big Brother sort of point of view, both are wrong, and
security and privacy is the only solution.
Question 21
I have heard that you said somewhere that we don't really need optical fibres but we need
creativity. Is this true and what do you mean by this?
Answer
I never said we don't need optical fibres, we need creativity. I've said that our problem
isn't bandwidth, our problem is we don't have enough new ideas and enough creativity. You
will have fibre to the home. There's no question about it. It's necessary. But that is not
our problem. Our problem is the creative use. And we know how to get fibre to the home;
it's a solved technical problem. Now we don't have a clue about how to make the Internet
interesting, navigable. How do you even go around? It's a very noisy place. How do build
agents, how do you build personalised newspapers? It is a long list of questions that we
don't know the answers to, but the problem isn't bandwidth, it's imagination.
Question 22
I find it so slow on the Internet.
Answer
The Internet is slow because it's growing so fast. It's growing world-wide 10 % per month
and in some countries 10 % per week. No system can grow that fast and not show slowness
and other problems of growth. But when you think historically, what has ever grown 10 %
per month or 10 % per week? A city? No. Nothing. That rate of growth is so phenomenal that
in my opinion while the Internet can be very slow, it depends what machine you're logging
onto, it's in fact scaled rather beautifully. The slowness usually is when you use it
let's say from the United States and you're logging into a site in Italy, is the very
narrow band between Italy and the United States. It's not the slowness either in Italy or
in the United States. So again, these things scale at different rates. They don't all
change in the proper order at the right time.
Question 23
Isn't your idea of a digital world too American? Americans tend to believe that all the
world is like America. We're just not. It's very profound. I would say that America is
another world in respect to Africa, South America, Central America, even Europe. Isn't
your idea, although fascinating and probably in the end true, going to take a long time?
How are you going to get fibres to all continents when in Italy we don't have cable, for
instance?
Answer
I don't think that America is the issue at all. I think it's about time that we dismissed
that thoroughly. I wrote an article for Wired magazine called "Why Europe is so
unwired". And I got more electronic mail from young people saying we're not unwired
at all, and I got a lot of electronic mail from older people saying you're absolutely
right. What's happening is that in Europe you have a stronger generational divide at the
moment. And this isn't at the risk of cultural values or at the risk, again, of your local
community. It's just about time to recognise that children really don't care. They are
intrinsically global. They are intrinsically digital. I live 3 or 4 months a year in
Europe. I went to school in Europe. My parents are European. My son lives in Italy. I've
been to just about ever country in the world. And when we set up computers in Africa in
Senegal, or in the mountains close to the Himalayas in Pakistan, and I was involved with
setting them up in South America and parts of the country where you would not even go
because the drug lords controlled it, and 5, 6, 7, 8 year-old kids world-wide behave like
ducks in water. This was not a middle class, suburban American phenomenon. The kids in
Senegal, Pakistan, Columbia played these computers like pianos immediately. So, I don't
think it's an American phenomenon.
Question 24
So what we basically need is old people to get young people and young people to get old
people to buy them? Do we need all this?
Answer
You can ask that about anything. I mean you can even ask that about fresh air. And I think
like fresh air, you want it. And it really is like air. It shouldn't be compared to the
automobile that gave you faster legs. It really is a little bit more ethereal, and you're
going to find that maybe it's marginalised in certain ways, maybe it'll start off in
niches in different countries, but eventually - and eventually is only 10 or 20 years, not
100 years - eventually you will find that it will be literally no different than air. You
just won't notice it until it's missing.
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with two particular
principles in mind: first that I was interested in how people communicated with machines.
And second: how would the information content - whether news, music, video production
,story-telling - effect the technology and the channel of communication 
