Program: A healthy digital ecology

Antony Funnell: We talk in the natural world, in nature, about the importance of a healthy ecology. Well, some of us do. Systems that interconnect, allowing for interactions between different types of organisms, and also between those organisms and their surrounding environment. That's the natural world, when it works.

But just how healthy, you might wonder, is the ecology of our digital world?

Today on Future Tense, three perspectives from three senior technology players on keeping the web healthy, open and innovative.

Hello, Antony Funnell here and welcome to the program.

Sandy Pentland: You know, you begin to live in the digital world. People consider it sort of part of the water that we swim in. But today, you don't own that water, it's owned by all these different companies, and companies that you're not even aware of because they've been siphoning off your data and doing things with it behind your back. Sort of an odd situation; you're a little bit like a serf in the Middle Ages where you work the land and grow the crops but they are not your crops, somebody else has already claimed them. And so the idea of a sustainable digital ecology is that you have the same rights to your digital self as you have to your physical self. So when there's data that's about you, you have control about that, that you can say what happens with it, just like you can say what happens with your body.

Antony Funnell: Professor Sandy Pentland is from MIT. We've had him on the program before. Like last week's guest Cory Doctorow he's quite a name in the digital world. He's a thinker as well as an innovator. He's the director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program. And on top of all that, in his spare time he co-leads the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives.

Like Cory Doctorow, he worries about the health of the digital world, and he talks about the need to ensure that our digital society works for humans, that we don't end up down the track with an online world that preferences the rights of corporations and governments ahead of people.

And to that end, he's also set up a not-for-profit research and educational institution called ID3, whose mission is to 'develop a new social ecosystem of trusted, self-healing digital institutions. This endeavour seeks to address the severe structural limitations of existing institutions by empowering individuals to assert greater control over their data, online identities and authentication, and in doing so, enable them to design and deploy a new generation of trusted digital institutions and services globally.'

Sandy Pentland: It sounds a little abstract but today data is the thing that is powering transportation networks, health networks, all the big digital enterprises, and you and I don't get a cut of that.

Antony Funnell: Sandy Pentland:

Sandy Pentland: I mean, we get services that are a little bit better, but I think it's analogous to people stealing things out of your pocket and then giving you back a few dimes. And so the idea of a sustainable digital ecology is that you are in control of the data about yourself. And over the last couple of years I have co-led a discussion at Davos, the World Economic Forum, with the chief regulators from the EU and the US and other countries, including China, but also the heads of these big corporations, showing that there is really a tension in the public's mind about who owns data about yourself. Is it you or is it some faceless corporation?

And what's nice to report is that the regulators are all on the side of people being able to control data about themselves. And we've been able to work out a win-win-win solution where the companies still can make money, they can still offer interesting services, but you are still much more in control of your life and your digital self. In the US it's called the Consumer Privacy Bill Of Rights, and it's Data Rights in the EU. So we're making progress on actually creating a sustainable digital environment. And the key is that individuals control data that's about them.

Antony Funnell: And trust is an important aspect here, isn't it. I know you've talked about building trusted networks as opposed to networks that are chiefly based on competition.

Sandy Pentland: Yes, the sort of a narrow version of it is today I might share information with some company in return for some service, and then they turn around and sell that information behind my back. So a trusted network is one where things like that don't happen, where there is actually transparency and trust in the interactions that have to do with data.

But when you begin to have systems that always operate that way, you build a much more stable society, one that is intrinsically a lot more fair and maybe won't have some of the financial crashes and strange goings on that we've been experiencing in the last few years here.

Antony Funnell: Why do you believe our digital world developed the way it did? Why did it take on the form that it currently has?

Sandy Pentland: It happened in a land rush. Suddenly there was this thing called the internet and there were no rules on the internet, and some of the early companies did a land grab, they went out and staked their claim, and there was no real competition for who owned the data. The average person wasn't aware of it, the politicians hardly noticed it. And so it grew up in a sort of Wild West situation.

But as it gets bigger and it begins to touch things like your bank information, your health information, your safety, your physical safety, it's time for that environment to grow up, it has to grow up, because all of a sudden a lawless type of environment is just not going to cut it. And so that's what we're seeing today, is that the early days were definitely 'no rules, go out there, figure out what you can do', and now that we are getting to the core parts of society, the systems that manage health and safety, we are realising that we have to have things that really work, they have to be trusted, they have to be democratic in a really basic sense in order for people to participate and for the system as a whole to function.

Antony Funnell: The digital world grew at a rapid rate, but building a sustainable digital ecology then, that's going to take time, isn't it.

Sandy Pentland: Yes, what is hard to imagine is that all the stuff that has happened so far is just the beginning, because what has happened so far is people trading information, people posting information, and now what we are getting is we're getting data about behaviour, metadata; where are the people, what are they doing, where are the boats going, where is the electricity going? All of that information is now being built into essentially the control systems, the basic systems of our society. And so health systems, financial systems, government, will all begin using that data to run in a much more efficient and fair way, but it also means that that data, that nervous system is going to have its fingers in everything and it's going to be incredibly valuable.

So at Davos when we talk about this, it's sort of universally assumed , and I think it is actually correct, that this world of digital data that will help us manage all of society's systems is actually going to be much more important than the internet has been to date, because it's not just looking things up and trading emails and stuff like that, all of a sudden this is how the electricity stays on in the middle of a storm, this is how there's somebody waiting for you with your medical records if you have an accident, this is how…on and on and on. So it becomes really integral to the fabric of our society and therefore much more valuable.

Antony Funnell: There are of course going to be, though, serious commercial reasons why major corporations are going to want to maintain the status quo and not move to the sort of online environment that you're talking about.

Sandy Pentland: It's an interesting thing. The biggest corporations in the world are not the Googles and the Apples and so forth of the world, they are the banks and the health systems and the electrical systems and things like that. And currently those all operate in a heavily regulated environment. They have to get a license from government to operate. And under the current licence they can't participate in this data economy, they can't resell the data, it's not theirs. And so they have to actually strike a deal with the government to be able to enter into the data economy. So the government has a very strong hand over them.

Also consumers have an expectation of them that they are not doing this, it's not something that we are used to. So the consequence is they are forced to be really the best practice in the area, they have to preserve privacy, they have to do what I call the new deal on data where people control data about themselves, because otherwise the regulator that gives them the licence to operate is going to come down on them hard.

And once you begin to get banks and hospitals and things more participating in a data economy, with the consumer or citizen as an equal partner, then regulators are going to turn to the digital companies, these new upstarts that have been largely unregulated, and say, look, if the large banks can do it, if the hospital systems can do it, you can give more power to people as well. And that's what they've said they're going to do, that's the politically viable thing for the regulators to do, and that's the way the war is going to be fought.

Antony Funnell: And just finally, your NGO, ID3, what direct role do you see that NGO playing in this process over time?

Sandy Pentland: We've created software that enables companies and other entities, governments for instance, several, trying to use our software and trying to look into how this new world where people are in control of their data will be. So they are using their software, they are using the model legal agreements we've created because we have a very strong legal contingent, and so we are all open source, all free, giving it away. We are just trying to promote the sustainable digital environment by creating the elements of it and encouraging people to use it.

Antony Funnell: Professor Sandy Pentland, thank you very much for joining us.

Sandy Pentland: Thanks.

Antony Funnell: Our second perspective today on keeping the web open and healthy, comes from technologist Kevin Marks, who until very recently was a vice president for the cloud computing company Salesforce.

Out of interest he's also worked in the past for both Apple and Google and he's on the Advisory Council for the Open Rights Group, a UK-based Digital Rights campaign organisation.

Our interest in Mr Marks for this show centres around his involvement in what's called the Indie Web movement, a community of people dedicated to fighting what Kevin Marks says are the illiberal tendencies of many of the major tech and communications companies.

Kevin Marks: The history goes back quite a long way really, to the idea of the web itself, which was designed by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by others to be open to everyone and to let anyone connect to anyone. So the Indie Web in some ways is trying to get back to those original values that define the web in the first place where anyone can run a server and anyone can run a client and you don't have to feed all your information through a large company to send a photograph to your friends.

The other issue that has become more obvious over the past couple of years is that originally these large companies made it fairly straightforward for other people to build on top of them and to connect to them and build whatever they liked. But over time they've been less liberal about that and explicitly shut down certain kinds of applications or made it harder to interoperate again. So part of the Indie Web movement is pushing back against that idea that those companies should decide who can build what.

Antony Funnell: And unless you push back, is there a danger that I guess the corporatisation of so much of the web then ends up stifling innovation?

Kevin Marks: That's part of it. There's always the ability to build something new, but the challenge is building it up to a big enough scale to affect lots of people. And what's happened, once these companies get very large they start being worried about that and start trying to stop other people getting to the scale that they are. So recent examples we've seen with that have been Facebook blocking Google from crawling Facebook pages and putting them in their index, Twitter doing the same thing with Google, Twitter and Instagram having a dispute over who can share what, where. So that Twitter stopped Instagram importing your Twitter friends, and then Instagram stopped Twitter displaying their photographs in line and so on. And that pushes back against the original idea of the web which is that there is a server, there are lots of servers and lots of clients and anyone could be running any kind of browser or any kind of web server and they can talk to each other.

So one of the things is that the idea of Google is based on the ability to fetch information from any website and index it, and then feed it back to you in a way that you can search it, so you can find things more easily, crawling the entire web, in effect downloading every web page, finding the key words in it, finding the information in it, organising that and making that available to other people so they can get to those pages. And Google were able to do that because anyone could fetch any web page and decide what to do with it. Nowadays it would be much harder to do that because many sites will actually block you from fetching their pages unless you are running an approved browser. If you try and download Facebook web pages with anything other than a browser they recognise, they will now block you and not give you the information.

So there is a sort of breakage at the level between these silos because they are trying to stop each other gaining advantage, and that is interfering to some extent with the ability for new things to be built.

Antony Funnell: So it's a significant issue, isn't it then, for anybody who uses the web. This isn't just an issue for people who want to be creative, who want to perhaps hack or do things like that.

Kevin Marks: There are lots of ways of being creative on the web, but the challenge is if there are only a few companies that control the ability to publish and spread, then they get to decide who gets to see what. So one of the key principles of the Indie Web is something we call POSSE, which is an acronym that stands for 'Publish on your Own Site, Share Elsewhere'. The idea being that if you spend some time making something, making a photograph, writing an essay, making a movie, anything like that, if the only place you can post that is on one of these large companies, then in effect they have control of it, whereas if you were also posting it on a place that you control yourself, something like a weblog or a self-hosted site, but you are sharing it out over these social sites too, then you have sort of independence from their control. And there are various complicated things around this involving copyright and takedown notices and things like that that make it more awkward.

But broadly there are a lot of systems that…in effect, when you post something to a Facebook feed or Google plus or Twitter or any of these kinds of sites, they are then deciding who gets to see it, either explicitly by propagating it and sharing it, or implicitly by their algorithms deciding who gets to see what. And so you can't always straightforwardly say 'here's this thing, go and find it here', whereas if you are hosting it on a web server yourself we still have the ability to send a URL to somebody and say 'here it is, have a look'.

Antony Funnell: One of the things that surprised me in looking at the Indie Web movement is that it seems to me a lot of the main players in the Indie Web movement also currently work for large internet companies or have worked for large companies. Should that surprise me?

Kevin Marks: Not really. The thing is that the way the computer industry works is people work for lots of different companies over time and build side projects and things as well, and a lot of the companies are very amenable to this and tolerant of both side projects and open source projects and things like that. One of the key ideas for the Indie Web is that most of the stuff we are building is open source, and the idea of open source is that anyone can then build their own version of it, modify it and share it with others and build on others work that way. So this is a great way for productively sharing with people you don't necessarily know you need to share with yet when you are building something. And this has become such a key part of how companies and the internet is built, it is encouraged by companies and individuals.

There is an obvious value to open source for an individual, which is that if you build something, the company can't then take it away from you, but there is also quite a lot of value for the companies in that they don't have to build everything from scratch, they can reuse other existing good work and find it. But also if you are using an open source project and somebody does leave the company, if they still care about that they will still maintain it, and even if they don't you can probably find a community of other people who are maintaining it too.

So there's this interesting thing where the open source projects and the open web standards that underpin the web are in many ways more enduring than any given company or individual in this world. These are the stable structures we are building. So part of the idea of the Indie Web is to encourage people to keep doing that and find ways to cooperate and build things that connect together.

Antony Funnell: Kevin Marks, thank you very much for joining us on Future Tense.

Kevin Marks: Thank you very much.

Anil Dash: When you say, as I often do, that the web has values or the web has ethics, people think it's a bit daft. It's a bit like saying, well, who will look after television and the ethics of television. This is just a medium, this is just a ubiquitous medium. And the truth of the matter is that when it was a smaller thing there was a sense that you would be true to it and that you would respect it. And that idea itself seems a bit maybe old-fashioned now.

Antony Funnell: Yes, he's a self-confessed nostalgic, in a positive way. He's our third and final guest today and his name is Anil Dash. Mr Dash is a writer and start-up entrepreneur and the co-founder of a platform called ThinkUp.

He's gained quite a deal of attention in recent times with two blog posts designed to remind his colleagues in the technology sector that the ecology of the digital world isn't something that should be taken for granted.

Go to our website and you'll find links to both. One is called 'The Web We Lost' and the other 'ThinkUp and What the Web Can Be'. Essentially Anil Dash argues that many technology companies, as they become successful, are forgetting the original ideals of the web.

So what were those ideals? Anil Dash:

Anil Dash: You know, at the very highest level there was this principle of inclusion, a very strong ethic of free speech and unfettered speech, even for unpopular ideas. Those things have persisted a bit, certainly we've done a good job at getting a lot of people connected to the network, we've done a good job at largely protecting free speech. But the other end of it, at this almost very technical level, foundational level, was this idea that we would have control over these bits of information that we share.

So when I post a photo of my son, at one level I would have privacy and controls to be able to trust that when I set the privacy it would be the same settings over time, it wouldn't change, it wouldn't suddenly become public. But also that when I decided I don't think I like this network anymore and maybe it's time for me to go to a different network, or maybe I've just outgrown this, that I would be able to take that with me and leave. And that idea, a simple portability and control and a bit of ownership over our presence and the content we create and the ideas we share, that has been almost utterly lost. I think that's the one that probably has most strongly been left behind in the last decade and a half.

Antony Funnell: And that control and ownership now very much rests with several large sites, doesn't it, several large multinational websites.

Anil Dash: Absolutely. And I have tremendous respect for the creators of Facebook, of Twitter, even of Google plus or any of the other networks that are out there, and I've spent time watching them grow. So I was probably in the first few hundred users of Twitter, of LinkedIn, of all these networks. I bear them no ill will for having created very valuable and useful services.

That being said, the difference between when I first saw those networks and what they are today is immense. At a simple level you look at something like Google, and as late as 2005 they had a blog post that said 'we will never, ever put banner ads and big blinking ads on our search results', and of course now that is exactly what they are testing. I have no aversion to that…they can make money however they choose, but I think it shows exactly the kind of evolution…you know, 'never' is an awful long time, and it's not a timescale on which Silicon Valley does a very good job of thinking.

And so in the case of Facebook, they are an enormously large company. They are publicly held here in the States, which means they have this obligation not just to return value to their shareholders but to keep growing and growing and increase the rate of growth, which is a tremendous burden to put on any company, but especially one that essentially relies on making money from our private information. If you are a company that makes jet engines or a company that makes clothing, the path to growth is fairly clear; you sell more units of that product.

If you are a company that is relying on capitalising on the information people share, it's a very different reckoning. Are you going to encourage them to share more and more personal information or are you going to mine more value out of the information they are already sharing, because there are only 7 billion of us on this planet after all anyway, and roughly 1 or1.5 billion of us that are connected to the internet in any form, and the majority of those people who are connected are on Facebook already. So growth is not going to happen by getting people onto the network for them any more. So necessarily it must be by getting more information out of those people who are connected, or by profiting more greatly from the information that is already being shared. Either one of those is a very fraught proposition.

Antony Funnell: Now, you care about this, but given the large numbers of people who continue to use the various services, the various platforms on the web despite what we know about the way in which a lot of these web companies operate. They don't seem to care as much. Why should people who are web users, why should they care about these issues? What difference does it really make in their lives?

Anil Dash: You know, to an ordinary user on an ordinary day it doesn't make a difference, and I wouldn't purport that it does. I think there are those in my cohort that are a bit more digital extremist that would say every day this is an affront. I don't feel that way. I think on an every-day basis actually it's a net positive to participate in these networks that connect you to people.

But in the long-term the track record of social networks that have come before in preserving something even for two or three years, let alone 20 or 30 years is terrible. Old internet users will remember 10 years ago there was Friendster, and eight years ago there was MySpace, and certainly around that same time there was Orkut, a network with tens of millions of users. And so here is a remarkable thing; these services all had a rise in popularity, all had tens of millions of dollars in funding, and now for the better part all of those profiles are gone. Everything ever posted to Friendster is gone, and that's 10 years ago, it is not 50 or 100 years ago. It's even decaying faster than our Polaroid photos do.

And so from a pure standpoint of cultural documentation, things are falling by the wayside. But even more profoundly, all of us who have ever been up in the attic and seen a photo of our grandparents or looked at an old journal or had a hand-me-down of some letters that were exchanged, all of those things are being stored on networks or in formats that are evaporating at really almost a fruit fly's lifespan, not at human scale certainly and not centuries old.

Antony Funnell: So the fragility of the web that we have today, as you've just outlined, it is that because we haven't developed a sense of history, a sense of being able to look effectively at the history of the web and keep in mind, as you say, the core values that were there a decade or so ago?

Anil Dash: Very much so. There is not a sense that the technology follows cycles, and some of this is because of who creates it. So when you trust 23-year-olds in Silicon Valley to be the leaders of an industry and then I point out, well, in a lot of ways Facebook resembles what AOL was to us 15 years ago, they say, well, I was eight years old then and still in short pants so I don't remember. You know, I don't fault them for not being familiar with the cycles that technology goes through because how could they be.

But at a deeper level, those of us who have been through the cycles don't tell the story very well. We do a very poor job of pointing out that these things are following cycles. And the fact that you are rich doesn't mean that you are going to do the right thing. And that's sort of the catch-all as well, that these companies have billions of dollars and they are publicly traded and their founders are fabulously wealthy and can't we trust them to preserve things? But history shows that the robber barons of the past have tended to not work on libraries and preservation until well into their retirement years.

Antony Funnell: Looking to the future, you argue that the developers of modern social networks have narrowed the possibilities of the web for a generation of users.

Anil Dash: That's right. The ways in which we interact with content are fairly narrowly prescribed. We can click a 'like' button, we can click a heart and favourite something, and we have a little comment box at the bottom. But the ideas of really open-ended experimentation and remixing and re-imagining the ways we share are very, very uncommon, they are not being focused on. I think you could have whatever colour Facebook page you want as long as it's blue. And there's something lost in that, there's something lost in a very templated experience. Admittedly it is easier to use and it's prettier and there are all these positives associated with it, but there is something lost too, not having a connection to that freewheeling open-endedness.

Then more broadly we used to keep the full fidelity of an item when it was being shared. So Flickr let you upload every size and shape of your photo that you had in the highest resolution that was possible, and so it's very easy to go back and look at a Flickr photo and say, oh, I can get a bigger image of this or I can see if I have permission to use this as my wallpaper on my computer if I'd like to reuse the same image or do something with it. Meanwhile, Instagram transforms the image with a filter, destroys the original by default, preserves this one kind of square cropped image but never what the original image was taken with our cameras, and then it's very hard to discover those images let alone nearly impossible to do anything with them later.

There is a cultural cost to this if we don't constantly advocate and push for the ability to use these things creatively and to think of frankly all our creations as raw materials, not just as finished products.

Antony Funnell: Anil Dash from ThinkUp. Our other guests today on Future Tense were MIT's Sandy Pentland, and Kevin Marks from the Indie Web movement.