How to Recognize The Future When It Lands On You
The first signs of the next shift began to reveal themselves to me on a Spring afternoon in the year 2000. That was when I began to notice people on the streets of Tokyo staring at their mobile phones instead of talking to them. The sight of this behavior, now commonplace in much of the world, triggered a sensation I had experienced a few times before - the instant recognition that a technology is going to change my life in ways I can scarcely imagine. Since then, the practice of exchanging short text messages via mobile telephones has led to the eruption of subcultures in Europe and Asia. At least one government has fallen, in part because of the way people used text messaging. Adolescent mating rituals, political activism, and corporate management styles have mutated in unexpected ways.

I've learned that "texting" is only a small harbinger of more profound changes to come over the next ten years. My media moment at Shibuya Crossing was only my first encounter with a phenomenon I've come to call "smart mobs." When I learned to recognize the signs, I began to see them everywhere - from barcodes to electronic bridge tolls.

The other pieces of the puzzle are all around us now, but haven't joined together yet. The radio chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it. Wireless Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The way buyers and sellers rate each other on Internet auction site eBay is part of it. At least one key global business question is part of it - why is the Japanese company DoCoMo profiting from enhanced wireless Internet services while US and European mobile telephony operators struggle to avoid failure?

When you piece together these different technological, economic, and social components, the result is an infrastructure that makes certain kinds of human actions possible that were never possible before: The killer apps of tomorrow's mobile infocom industry won't be hardware devices or software programs but social practices. The most far-reaching changes will come, as they often do, from the kinds of relationships, enterprises, communities and markets that the infrastructure makes possible.

Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other. The people who make up mart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.

Shibuya Epiphany

My epiphany in Shibuya Crossing led me around the world, to observe street culture, visit development laboratories, seek out industry analysts and sociologists -- anybody who could help me make sense of the technosocial phenomena of smart mobs. In Tokyo, I interviewed teenagers who appropriated mobile texting technology and set off a world-wide industry and grassroots cultural transformation. I also talked with the people who steered NTT's DoCoMo to success in the mobile Internet business at the same time their formidable competitors in Europe and America foundered and failed to connect the mobile telephone's portability and popularity with the Internet's capabilities. In Helsinki, I saw how the cultural appropriations of teenagers had transformed the communication norms of the entire society, met futurists and social scientists who studied the future by looking at what people were doing in the streets today. In Stockholm, I rode around the city half the night with a car full of maniacally devoted gamers, engaged in a location-based virtual combat game involving automobiles, laptops and wireless Internet connections, and text messages to mobile telephones. Torna a Indice

Technologies of Cooperation

The product of smart mob technologies is cooperation, not horsepower or mind power. Inclined planes and nuclear reactors multiply the power of muscles. Intellectual technologies like mathematics and graphic user interfaces augment the capabilities of cognition. The power of mobile and pervasive communications derive from the ways people can use them to organize social groups in new ways.

Understanding human cooperation, from its evolutionary origins to its social dynamics, is key to understanding smart mobs. Sociologists have studied collective action dilemmas, ecologists have puzzled over "the tragedy of the commons," economists have used the Prisoner's Dilemma game to probe cooperative and competitive strategies. Cybersociologists, evolutionary biologists, social network analysts provide clues to the ways mobile communications, peer to peer methodologies, wireless Internet connections, and reputation systems make new levels of cooperation possible. Torna a Indice

Computation Nations and Swarm Supercomputers

A few million PCs is not just more than a single PC -- it constitutes a new universe of computation. Even in its earliest stages, the peer to peer phenomenon amassed staggering computing power to search for life in outer space or calculate the shape of new medicines, aggregated disk space for peer to peer file sharing collectives, mutated new forms of publishing and organizing knowledge -- SETI@home and Napster were only the first eruptions of collective computation.

The role of voluntary cooperation is the most important and least known story is the history of personal computers and networks. The PC wasn't built by the computer industry, but by mavericks who got off on building things together that they couldn't create as individuals. The fundamental architecture of the Internet was built on free software and cooperation. The story of Unix, open source, the Internet and Usenet pioneers, is not just about the past. Dotcoms died at the same time blogs bloomed. Self-organization is an irrepressible human drive, and the Internet is a toolkit for self-organizing. The mobile Internet brings this power of self-organization out of deskbound and bodiless cyberspace into the face-to-face dimension.

The people who created personal computing and Internetworking succeeded in transforming the media they used because they were regarded as "user," not as "consumers." The ability of smart mobs to self-organize as users is a critical factor in whether the Internet of tomorrow will be open to further innovation, or whether it will be enclosed, monitored, metered, and controlled. Torna a Indice

The Era of Sentient Things

Different lines of research and development that have progressed slowly for decades are accelerating now because sufficient computation and communication capabilities recently became affordable. These projects originated in different fields but are converging on the same boundary between artificial and natural worlds. The vectors of this research include:

• Information in places: media linked to location.
• Smart rooms: environments that sense inhabitants and respond to them.
• Digital cities: adding information capabilities to urban places.
• Sentient objects: adding information and communication to physical objects.
• Tangible bits: manipulating the virtual world by manipulating physical objects.
• Wearable computers: sensing, computing, communicating gear worn as clothing.
  

Information and communication technologies are invading the physical world, a trend that hasn't even begun to climb the hockey stick growth curve. Shards of sentient silicon will be inside boxtops and dashboards, pens, street corners, bus stops, money, most things that are manufactured or built, within the next ten years. These technologies are "sentient" not because embedded chips can reason, but because they can sense, receive, store, and transmit information. Some of these cheap chips sense where they are: the cost of a global positioning system chip capable of tracking its location via satellite to accuracy of ten to fifteen meters is around $15 and dropping.

Watch smart mobs emerge when millions of people use location-aware mobile communication devices in computation-pervaded environments. Things we hold in our hands are already speaking to things in the world. Using our telephones as remote controls is only the beginning. At the same time that the environment is growing more sentient, the device in your hand is evolving from portable to wearable. A new media sphere is emerging from this process, one that could become at least as influential, lucrative, and ubiquitous as previous media spheres opened by print, telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, and the wired Internet. Torna a Indice

The Evolution of Reputation

Since Tokyo and Helsinki, I've investigated the convergence of portable, pervasive, location-sensitive, intercommunicating devices with social practices that make the technologies useful to groups as well as individuals. Foremost among these social practices are the "reputation systems" that are beginning to spring up online - computer-mediated trust brokers. The power of smart mobs comes in part from the way age-old social practices surrounding trust and cooperation are being mediated by new communication and computation technologies.

In this coming world, the acts of association and assembly, core rights of free societies, might change radically when each of us will be able to know who in our vicinity is likely to buy what we have to sell, sell what we want to buy, know what we need to know, want the kind of sexual or political encounter we also want. As online events are woven into the fabric of our physical world, governments and corporations will gain even more power over our behavior and beliefs than large institutions wield today. At the same time, citizens will discover new ways to band together to resist powerful institutions. A new kind of digital divide ten years from now will separate those who know how to use new media to band together from those who don't.

Knowing how - and who - to trust, is going to become more and more important (has been becoming more and more important for a long time). Banding together, from lynch mobs to democracies, taps the power of collective action. At the core of collective action is reputation - the histories each of us pull behind us that others routinely inspect to decide our value for everything from conversation partners to mortgage risks. Reputation systems have been fundamental to social life for a long time. In intimate societies, everyone knows everyone and everyone's biography is an open, if not undisputed, book. m us up to date on who to trust, who other people trust, who is important, and who decides who is important.

Today's online reputation systems are computer-based technologies that make it possible to manipulate in new and powerful ways an old and essential human trait. Note the rise of web sites like eBay (auctions), Epinions (consumer advice), Amazon (books, CDs, electronics), Slashdot (conversation) and Plastic (publishing and conversation), built around the contributions of millions of customers, enhanced by reputation systems that police the quality of the content and transactions exchanged through the sites. In each of these businesses, the consumers are also the producers of what they consume, the value of the market increases as more people use it, and the aggregate opinions of the users provides the measure of trust necessary for transactions and markets to flourish in cyberspace. Torna a Indice

Wireless Quilts

Recent technical and regulatory events have made it possible for citizens to share wireless Internet access today at speeds higher than expected for the expensive "3rd Generation" (3G) mobile telephones major telephony operators are trying to provide in the near future. Someone has to buy a high-speed Internet connection from an existing ("upstream") provider in order to support a ("downstream") wireless community, but now the community of users has the power to do things that only the connection provider could do in the past.

Whether wireless guerrillas blanket the world with inexpensive high-speed Internet access before the big players crush them remains to be seen. Wiring the world over the past century, from the telegraph to the Internet, disrupted old social patterns and led to the creation of new ones. Unwiring the world over the next decades will disrupt existing social arrangements just as profoundly, in several different ways:

Untethering the Web colonizes the world with computation, pervading environments far from the desktop with networked intelligent devices. Computation, once available only through wired access points, becomes available everywhere.

Telecommunications networks become available in places where wires weren't previously economically feasible. One in eight people in Botswana have a mobile telephone. Some of the most advanced wireless LAN experiments in the US are on Indian reservations that don't have telephone lines.

High data-speeds made possible by radio-based technologies are likely to multiply the effects of mobile Internet in unpredictable ways, as well. In digital media, quantum leaps in speed often trigger qualitative jumps in the ways people use them.

Combine high transfer rates, yesterday's supercomputer on today's chips, and p2p methodology, and many things presently unimagined become possible.

The bottom-up force of wireless freenetting and top-down force of 3G mobile telephony are heading for decisive conflicts over the next five years, but an eventual showdown has been inevitable since the US government locked its regulatory framework onto a technical understanding of wireless technologies as it stood in 1912-34Recently, those who are knowledgeable about the law and about the state of the art of radio technologies are challenging the idea that chopping up the frequency bands into specific pieces of property is the most efficient way to use the resource. Telecommunication companies around the world paid more than $150 billion to various governments in the late 1990s for licenses to use portions of the electromagnetic spectrum for future commercial purposes such as broadband access for mobile phones. At the same time that governments were auctioning off the electromagnetic spectrum, rapidly evolving wireless communication technologies started making it possible to treat the spectrum as abundant rather than scarce. Technologies known as "spread spectrum," "wideband" and "software defined radio" have explosive implications. If the spectrum ceases to be a scarce resource because of technological innovation, then the government doesn't need to regulate its use to protect its owners, the citizens, in the same way it did when the spectrum was first regulated at the beginning of the radio age. The neighborhood wireless activists are up against powerful financial interests and political powers that be, from AT&T to the FCC. But they have Moore's, Metcalfe's, and Reed's laws on their sides. Torna a Indice

Smart Mobs and the Power of the Mobile Many

On January 20th, 2001, President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob. More than one million Manila residents, mobilized and coordinated by waves of text messages, assembled at the site of the 1986 "People Power" peaceful demonstrations that had toppled the Marcos regime. Tens of thousands of Filipinos converged on Epifanio de los Santas Avenue, known as "Edsa," within an hour of the first text message volleys. Over four days, more than a million citizens showed up.

Bringing down a government without firing a shot was a momentous early eruption of smart mob behavior. It wasn't the only one.

On November 30, 1999, autonomous but internetworked squads of demonstrators protesting the meeting of the World Trade Organization used "swarming" tactics, mobile phones, websites, laptops, and PDAs to win "The Battle of Seattle."

In September 2000, thousands of citizens in Britain, outraged by a sudden rise in gasoline prices, used mobile phones, SMS, email from laptop PCs, and CB radios in taxicabs, to coordinate dispersed groups that blocked fuel delivery at selected service stations in a wildcat political protest.

A violent political demonstration in Toronto in the Spring of 2000 was chronicled by a group of roving journalist-researchers who webcast digital video of everything they saw.

Since 1992, thousands of bicycle activists have assembled monthly for "Critical Mass" moving demonstrations, weaving through San Francisco streets en masse. Critical Mass operates through loosely linked networks, alerted by mobile phone and email trees, and breaks up into smaller, tele-coordinated groups when appropriate.

In light of the military and terrorist potential of netwar tactics it would be foolish to presume that only benign outcomes should be expected from smart mobs. But any observer who focuses exclusively on the potential for violence would miss evidence of perhaps even more profoundly disruptive potential - for beneficial as well as malign purposes - of smart mob technologies and techniques. Could cooperation epidemics break out if smart mob media spread beyond warriors - to citizens, journalists, scientists, people looking for fun, friends, mates, customers, or trading partners?

Consider a few experiments on the fringes of mobile communications that might point toward a wide variety of nonviolent smart-mobbing in the future:

"Interpersonal awareness devices" have been evolving for several years. Since 1998, hundreds of thousands Japanese have used Lovegety keychain devices that signal when another Lovegety owner of the opposite sex and compatible profile is within fifteen feet.

ImaHima ("are you free now?") enables hundreds of thousands of Tokyo i-mode users to alert buddies who are in their vicinity at the moment.

Upoc ("universal point of contact") in Manhattan sponsors mobile communities of interest: any member of "manhattan celebrity watch", "nyc terrorism alert", "prayer of the day" or "The Resistance," for example, can broadcast text messages to and receive messages from all the other members.

Phones that make it easy to send digital video directly to the web make it possible for "peer to peer journalism" networks to emerge; Steve Mann's students in Toronto have chronicled at newsworthy events by webcasting everything their wearable cameras and microphones capture.

Researchers in Oregon have constructed "social middleware" that enables wearable computer users to form ad hoc communities, using distributed reputation systems, privacy and knowledge-sharing agents, and wireless networks. Torna a Indice

Always-On Panopticon...or Cooperation Amplifier

If the citizens of the early 20th century had paid more attention to the ways horseless carriages were changing their lives, could they have found ways to embrace the freedom, power, and convenience of automobiles without reordering their grandchildren's habitat in ugly ways? Before we start wearing our computers and digitizing our cities, can the generations of the early 21st century imagine what questions our grandchildren will wish we had asked today? Technology practices that might change the way we think are particularly worthy of critical scrutiny: High-resolution screens and broadband communication channels aren't widget-making machinery, but sense-capturing, imagination-stimulating, opinion-shaping machinery...

Over the next few years, will nascent smart mobs be neutralized into passive if mobile consumers of another centrally controlled mass medium, with the world divided into a small number of producers and a large population of passive consumers? Or will an innovation commons flourish, in which a large number of consumers also have the power to produce? The convergence of smart mob technologies is inevitable. The way we use these technologies, and the way governments allow us to use them, is very much in question. Technologies of cooperation, or the ultimate disinfotainment apparatus? The next several years are a crucial and unusually malleable interregnum. Especially in this interval before the new media sphere settles into its final shape, what we know and what we do matters.
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