The Future Perfect
( <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/stillframe/" target="Stillframe">Stillframe</a>/flickr
)
Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Jonathan Zittrain's new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, is a clarion call to protect the freedom of the Internet from those who would stifle it for the sake of security and reliability.
Zittrain says there are two paths to the wired world of the future. One is tethered to a central brain and barricaded, like the IBM mainframes of old. The other path is the unbounded Internet we have now, what he calls a generative system, that allows everyone to tinker and invent, unimpeded.
The first generative system was introduced in the late '70s by Steve Jobs, wearing his first suit at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It was basically components assembled in a molded plastic case, ungainly but convenient, and yours to control with the right software – the world's first personal computer, the Apple II.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
What was most amazing about this moment was that Steve did not have particular expectations of how the machine would be used and how far it would go. But then, within two years, two guys – Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin – invented VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet ever.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The first computer spreadsheet.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Yes. And businesses around the world were like, wow, where have you been all our lives? And they started buying spreadsheets, which meant they had to buy Apple IIs.
So Apple IIs start flying off the shelves and Apple has no idea why. They had to do market research to figure out why their machine was so popular.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And why was it?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
It was popular because totally unrelated guys to the vendors, Dan and Bob, had come up with an amazing application, and Apple was not limited to its own imagination as to what its computer could do.
And now it's so commonplace that you don't even think about it. You can run software coming from anywhere in the world, written by anybody, and nobody in the middle – not the computer vendor, not the operating system vendor. Even Bill Gates, the famously proprietary Bill Gates, doesn't and can't stop you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Now, you say that the two modern emblems of generative path with the Apple II and the non-generative or ungenerative path with the iPhone. Both have the same progenitor – Steve Jobs.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Yeah. So fast-forward 30 years. Now it's 2007 and Steve Jobs is making another big technology introduction in San Francisco, and it's the gorgeous iPhone. And everybody I know who has an iPhone basically loves it.
And I say it's great, too. But my worry is Steve Jobs made no apology that he controls the horizontal and the vertical. He controls the phone from soup to nuts.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We don't want blank-slate cell phones that have to be programmed. I want to buy it, take it out of the box, turn it on, make a call. He has a point. What's pernicious about this, even theoretically?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Problem number one is no more surprises. You don't get two guys in a garage cooking up something like the spreadsheet - Internet telephony like Skype, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer music sharing, email - the World Wide Web itself came from a physicist who was goofing around. So to lose that ability to be able to cook up something and send it around and see whether it works, that would be a terrible loss. That's one thing.
The other thing is that devices like the iPhone, whether they are, as in their first version, what I call sterile – just Steve Jobs gets to change them – or even in their second version, what I call contingently generative - third parties now can write code for the iPhone but Steve Jobs still gets to approve it or yank it if he doesn't like it - that makes these things very controllable by regulators who go through people like Steve Jobs to do it. And I can give you an example of that.
TiVo sued EchoStar not long ago for patent infringement. They said that EchoStar made a digital video recorder that was too much like a TiVo. They won, and EchoStar owes them 90 million dollars. But then they asked for something more. They got an order from the judge that said within 30 days, EchoStar had to fry by a remote upgrade all but a handful of the EchoStar DVRs already sold and placed in [LAUGHING] living rooms around the world.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
That's it. You wake up, your EchoStar becomes an Echo brick. And then I start to think about this by analogy. Imagine coming down to the kitchen to find that your toaster has enjoyed the winter update and now it has a third slot. And, you know, all right, I guess I could use that third [LAUGHS] slot to make a little more toast now.
But it's a little puzzling to realize that you didn't buy an object and now it's yours. You bought a continuing service from a vendor that can be influenced by outsiders, as well as its own limbs.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
On the other hand, something that some outside source can provide is security, both personal and national. We've all seen the Hollywood scenarios about banks collapsing or planes colliding or identities disappearing because of evildoers who are armed with viruses and worms. And it's because it's an open system that we have worms. Generative systems are hazardous.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
This is what makes the needle pretty difficult to thread. It would be a shorter book if what I could say is, you can have my PC when you pry it from my cold [LAUGHING] dead hands. And come on, everybody, join me. Even though it doesn't work so well at times, hang on to it because it's worth it.
But I don't want play to have to face a dichotomy between an open PC that has the benefit of running code from anywhere, which is why we like it, but the curse of running code from anywhere, which is why it can be so easily subverted, on the one hand, or a sterile or contingently generative appliance or service, like the iPhone or the Facebook application system on the other.
And what I propose in the book are ways to try to blunt the sharpest edges of the open PC and of the open Internet so that we can preserve the features that matter most, what I call the generative features.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In fact, you say that we need a latter-day Manhattan Project, not to build the bomb but to design the tools and conventions by which to continually diffuse one.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
I'm part of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. And together these research programs have started something called StopBadware, which is meant to be an initiative, a dot-org, that can help take on some of the problems of bad code and try to thread that needle of how to solve the problem of systems that are too open without having to close them down.
And there's a website out there that is perfectly safe now, I should alert you, but for a time was not, called Chuckroast.com. You can go to Chuckroast, buy a jacket. It turns out, though, that for a while the Chuckroast site had been hacked. Unbeknownst to Chuck Henderson, who runs Chuckroast, people visiting the site with the wrong browser would come away with their computer completely compromised by the anonymous attacker.
And for sites like this, there hasn't been anybody to own security. You try to tell even a well-meaning webmaster, hey, did you realize your site's been hacked, and aside from selling your product it's distributing viruses? They don't know how to process that. Their answer is, ahh, whatever. Would you like to buy a fleece?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS]
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
And we worked with Google – we still do – such that Google sends a robot out to crawl the Web as an innocent browser waiting to be hijacked. And it encounters a site like Chuckroast, Chuckroast tries to hijack it, and Google notes that and gives that data to us.
In that way, we can then note what websites are dangerous out there, and Google notes it on its search results. There's actually an extra note on it that says, "Warning: This site may harm [LAUGHS] your computer." Don't go there.
And, as you might guess, that greatly affects the flow of traffic to websites, and suddenly they have every incentive in the world to clean up.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And this is the StopBadware program.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Correct.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Do you guys wear badges?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
[LAUGHS] Well, I'm tempted to say we don't need no stinkin' badges.
But I think, better, the idea is to have a lot of people be able to pick up a badge on their way in. You wear it and you realize that maybe, for instance, if you're Chuckroast and you've been hacked, maybe some people can help you on condition that you'll help the next set of people that get hacked, and pay it forward.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And this is what concerns me. I mean, at the beginning of your book, you make reference to the fact that a lot of the people who conceived and helped build the Internet were very naive about the sorts of people who would use it and how people could be made into good netizens.
Well, you know, all these years later, you're back at square one. You're still relying on netizenship. Most people are like me. They don't have a great instinct for machines. You have to contend with a population of Internet users yelling for simplicity above all else. And doesn't that mean that your cause is lost?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Doesn't mean the cause is lost. The ideas I have include, for example, being willing to download a little piece of software to your machine that reports its vital signs back to the rest of the herd, to the other people using their machines similarly.
And with it, you can relay when there's software that's not working so well and when it's working better, even if you're a novice - you don't have to be a geek to make this work - ultimately having a social dimension to the computing and the networking that we're doing, realizing that it's an act of collective hallucination that's gotten us this far and it requires help from all of us to maintain.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Like Democracy.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
[LAUGHS] Like Democracy itself. Exactly. And in that sense it is sort of a Constitutional moment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
I think it's a question of competing stakes. I mean, you are saying that the most important thing is to preserve innovation. On the other hand, the Internet also controls our records, our identities. These things are too important to be compromised even for a moment.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
It's true. And my thought is there are actually a couple of rabbits still to be pulled out of the hat that might buy us some time.
A guy named Butler Lamson at Microsoft Research came up with the idea of a Red machine and a Green machine – virtual machines inside one PC. It's basically like two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive on your vehicle. And there's a way to take your PC off-roading.
So you've got your spreadsheets and your financial data and your term papers in the Green zone, and then you can go off-roading and load up that bizarre program. You know, I want to see the hamster dance. It's such a tantalizing program. [BROOKE LAUGHS] But then you run it, and maybe it eats the hard drive.
But luckily it stays in the Red zone, and you have a special button that basically just wipes clean the Red zone and starts it again. That's a way maybe of preserving the experimentalist spirit that's gotten us so far while also conceding that so much of what we do is now mission critical.
So there are some ideas discussed in the book of that flavor that try to make it so that non-technical people as much as possible can still meaningfully use technologies that let them experiment without the experiment blowing up in their faces.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Thanks a lot.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Thanks so much, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Jonathan Zittrain is the professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The new book is called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.
Jonathan Zittrain's new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, is a clarion call to protect the freedom of the Internet from those who would stifle it for the sake of security and reliability.
Zittrain says there are two paths to the wired world of the future. One is tethered to a central brain and barricaded, like the IBM mainframes of old. The other path is the unbounded Internet we have now, what he calls a generative system, that allows everyone to tinker and invent, unimpeded.
The first generative system was introduced in the late '70s by Steve Jobs, wearing his first suit at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It was basically components assembled in a molded plastic case, ungainly but convenient, and yours to control with the right software – the world's first personal computer, the Apple II.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
What was most amazing about this moment was that Steve did not have particular expectations of how the machine would be used and how far it would go. But then, within two years, two guys – Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin – invented VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet ever.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The first computer spreadsheet.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Yes. And businesses around the world were like, wow, where have you been all our lives? And they started buying spreadsheets, which meant they had to buy Apple IIs.
So Apple IIs start flying off the shelves and Apple has no idea why. They had to do market research to figure out why their machine was so popular.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And why was it?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
It was popular because totally unrelated guys to the vendors, Dan and Bob, had come up with an amazing application, and Apple was not limited to its own imagination as to what its computer could do.
And now it's so commonplace that you don't even think about it. You can run software coming from anywhere in the world, written by anybody, and nobody in the middle – not the computer vendor, not the operating system vendor. Even Bill Gates, the famously proprietary Bill Gates, doesn't and can't stop you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Now, you say that the two modern emblems of generative path with the Apple II and the non-generative or ungenerative path with the iPhone. Both have the same progenitor – Steve Jobs.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Yeah. So fast-forward 30 years. Now it's 2007 and Steve Jobs is making another big technology introduction in San Francisco, and it's the gorgeous iPhone. And everybody I know who has an iPhone basically loves it.
And I say it's great, too. But my worry is Steve Jobs made no apology that he controls the horizontal and the vertical. He controls the phone from soup to nuts.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We don't want blank-slate cell phones that have to be programmed. I want to buy it, take it out of the box, turn it on, make a call. He has a point. What's pernicious about this, even theoretically?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Problem number one is no more surprises. You don't get two guys in a garage cooking up something like the spreadsheet - Internet telephony like Skype, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer music sharing, email - the World Wide Web itself came from a physicist who was goofing around. So to lose that ability to be able to cook up something and send it around and see whether it works, that would be a terrible loss. That's one thing.
The other thing is that devices like the iPhone, whether they are, as in their first version, what I call sterile – just Steve Jobs gets to change them – or even in their second version, what I call contingently generative - third parties now can write code for the iPhone but Steve Jobs still gets to approve it or yank it if he doesn't like it - that makes these things very controllable by regulators who go through people like Steve Jobs to do it. And I can give you an example of that.
TiVo sued EchoStar not long ago for patent infringement. They said that EchoStar made a digital video recorder that was too much like a TiVo. They won, and EchoStar owes them 90 million dollars. But then they asked for something more. They got an order from the judge that said within 30 days, EchoStar had to fry by a remote upgrade all but a handful of the EchoStar DVRs already sold and placed in [LAUGHING] living rooms around the world.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
That's it. You wake up, your EchoStar becomes an Echo brick. And then I start to think about this by analogy. Imagine coming down to the kitchen to find that your toaster has enjoyed the winter update and now it has a third slot. And, you know, all right, I guess I could use that third [LAUGHS] slot to make a little more toast now.
But it's a little puzzling to realize that you didn't buy an object and now it's yours. You bought a continuing service from a vendor that can be influenced by outsiders, as well as its own limbs.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
On the other hand, something that some outside source can provide is security, both personal and national. We've all seen the Hollywood scenarios about banks collapsing or planes colliding or identities disappearing because of evildoers who are armed with viruses and worms. And it's because it's an open system that we have worms. Generative systems are hazardous.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
This is what makes the needle pretty difficult to thread. It would be a shorter book if what I could say is, you can have my PC when you pry it from my cold [LAUGHING] dead hands. And come on, everybody, join me. Even though it doesn't work so well at times, hang on to it because it's worth it.
But I don't want play to have to face a dichotomy between an open PC that has the benefit of running code from anywhere, which is why we like it, but the curse of running code from anywhere, which is why it can be so easily subverted, on the one hand, or a sterile or contingently generative appliance or service, like the iPhone or the Facebook application system on the other.
And what I propose in the book are ways to try to blunt the sharpest edges of the open PC and of the open Internet so that we can preserve the features that matter most, what I call the generative features.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In fact, you say that we need a latter-day Manhattan Project, not to build the bomb but to design the tools and conventions by which to continually diffuse one.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
I'm part of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. And together these research programs have started something called StopBadware, which is meant to be an initiative, a dot-org, that can help take on some of the problems of bad code and try to thread that needle of how to solve the problem of systems that are too open without having to close them down.
And there's a website out there that is perfectly safe now, I should alert you, but for a time was not, called Chuckroast.com. You can go to Chuckroast, buy a jacket. It turns out, though, that for a while the Chuckroast site had been hacked. Unbeknownst to Chuck Henderson, who runs Chuckroast, people visiting the site with the wrong browser would come away with their computer completely compromised by the anonymous attacker.
And for sites like this, there hasn't been anybody to own security. You try to tell even a well-meaning webmaster, hey, did you realize your site's been hacked, and aside from selling your product it's distributing viruses? They don't know how to process that. Their answer is, ahh, whatever. Would you like to buy a fleece?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS]
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
And we worked with Google – we still do – such that Google sends a robot out to crawl the Web as an innocent browser waiting to be hijacked. And it encounters a site like Chuckroast, Chuckroast tries to hijack it, and Google notes that and gives that data to us.
In that way, we can then note what websites are dangerous out there, and Google notes it on its search results. There's actually an extra note on it that says, "Warning: This site may harm [LAUGHS] your computer." Don't go there.
And, as you might guess, that greatly affects the flow of traffic to websites, and suddenly they have every incentive in the world to clean up.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And this is the StopBadware program.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Correct.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Do you guys wear badges?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
[LAUGHS] Well, I'm tempted to say we don't need no stinkin' badges.
But I think, better, the idea is to have a lot of people be able to pick up a badge on their way in. You wear it and you realize that maybe, for instance, if you're Chuckroast and you've been hacked, maybe some people can help you on condition that you'll help the next set of people that get hacked, and pay it forward.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And this is what concerns me. I mean, at the beginning of your book, you make reference to the fact that a lot of the people who conceived and helped build the Internet were very naive about the sorts of people who would use it and how people could be made into good netizens.
Well, you know, all these years later, you're back at square one. You're still relying on netizenship. Most people are like me. They don't have a great instinct for machines. You have to contend with a population of Internet users yelling for simplicity above all else. And doesn't that mean that your cause is lost?
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Doesn't mean the cause is lost. The ideas I have include, for example, being willing to download a little piece of software to your machine that reports its vital signs back to the rest of the herd, to the other people using their machines similarly.
And with it, you can relay when there's software that's not working so well and when it's working better, even if you're a novice - you don't have to be a geek to make this work - ultimately having a social dimension to the computing and the networking that we're doing, realizing that it's an act of collective hallucination that's gotten us this far and it requires help from all of us to maintain.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Like Democracy.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
[LAUGHS] Like Democracy itself. Exactly. And in that sense it is sort of a Constitutional moment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
I think it's a question of competing stakes. I mean, you are saying that the most important thing is to preserve innovation. On the other hand, the Internet also controls our records, our identities. These things are too important to be compromised even for a moment.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
It's true. And my thought is there are actually a couple of rabbits still to be pulled out of the hat that might buy us some time.
A guy named Butler Lamson at Microsoft Research came up with the idea of a Red machine and a Green machine – virtual machines inside one PC. It's basically like two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive on your vehicle. And there's a way to take your PC off-roading.
So you've got your spreadsheets and your financial data and your term papers in the Green zone, and then you can go off-roading and load up that bizarre program. You know, I want to see the hamster dance. It's such a tantalizing program. [BROOKE LAUGHS] But then you run it, and maybe it eats the hard drive.
But luckily it stays in the Red zone, and you have a special button that basically just wipes clean the Red zone and starts it again. That's a way maybe of preserving the experimentalist spirit that's gotten us so far while also conceding that so much of what we do is now mission critical.
So there are some ideas discussed in the book of that flavor that try to make it so that non-technical people as much as possible can still meaningfully use technologies that let them experiment without the experiment blowing up in their faces.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Thanks a lot.
JONATHAN ZITTRAIN:
Thanks so much, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Jonathan Zittrain is the professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The new book is called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.
