The Keynote formerly known as Smart Mobs

A year ago he was watching the conference remotely blogged by Cory, and decided that he had to be here watching it.

"You can create tools that amplify collective action". Stuff is happening that will continue to enclose our rights; innovate around it.

"Collective action". People choose to participate, voluntarily. Enabled by communication methods. They're enabled by literacy, by technology, by social agreements.

The Web. Enabling technology; built without constraints, enabled by and enabling collective action.

"Early signs of technocollective action". P2p. Folding@home. Wikipedia. Seattle Wireless. Social software. "Ten years from now, when we have billoions of people walking the streets, each of them wearing or carrying comptuers, with [greater processor and] with wireless bandwidth [...]" What are we going to do, when we have that much computation power available?

WiFi is an industry example of collective action. Any form of wiki, mailing list, those are tools for collaborative action; without them acting together.

"The use of mobile communications to keep those elections honest", in reference to voting in other countries than the US. Coordinating actions using texting. Moveon.org? Okay.

Power is not just about elections. I think the big power question we face: "Are we going to be consumers, or are we going to be users?"

We were treated as consumers until the PC gave us the power to take an active voice in what was formerly a passive distribution method: movies, music, etc. The media industry is clearly aware that the Internet wasn't created, and is being run from the user's end of the game, not the corporate.

Users who actively helped make the PC what it is today "actively shaped what could be done with the medium".

"... have to work for Disney, if you want to innovate, if you want to change the nature of the medium." Compromise of the end-to-end principle, routers that discriminate. "Balkanization of networks".

It's time to get involved in helping innovation. Get involved! GET INVOLVED! Feel like you don't have a voice? Contact me, I'll find a way to make you heard.

Make a human communication media, with a portion of the spectrum available for spectrum experimentation. "We're locked down with telegraph keys", limited by the legal and political restrictions to a technology that doesn't serve us as well as the ones we know we can create.

Invent micropayments! "The recording industry claims that they compensate artists". "70 million people voted with their modems: That's how they want to distribute music in the future." What none of the p2p music things have done is find a way to give consumers a fair price for the music, so music lovers can negotiate directly with the artists.

"If the recording industry and the movie industry were to go away tomorrow, the quality of music and movies availabe to us would go up immediately."

A self-organizing network is one that doesn't need to be pre-enabled by anything. There'll be billions of people communicating with devices; they need to be able to network, without interference.

"Trust mechanisms are pivotal". Trust is key. Reputation evolution?

[time passes]

Will this system remain open? Will we retain the ability to mark up anything?

Proctor & Gamble is going to be deploying RFID tags at the case & pallet level.

Think about designing whole systems: build in room for future innovators. Build in the ability for the network to grow beyond what you can think of. Link to others! Link to competitors! Find ways to enable individuals *themselves* to build new links -- and new types of links. They'll do things we can't dream of.

"Is there a default privacy switch on that technology? Can you turn it off? [...] Does it default to off? As we know, only geeks mess with defaults. [...] How can we use our technologies to seperate ourselves from technology, if that's what we want to do?"

Surveillance symmetry! How can we watch who's watching us, or prevent them from watching us? The problem isn't transparency, it's the monitoring asymmetry: you can't tell what they're doing with the information they collect about you.

"some of the important things that are going to shape our future" -- Tim O.

Rheingold's been involved with the Well? Interesting. That explains why the transition to smart mobs was so light.

"As I was finishing the book, I had an increasing sense that we were at a pivotal point in technology." - Rheingold

"You can't invent your way out of this unless you understand the regulatory constraints. If you're going to rely strictly on the professional arena, you're up against professionals ..." - Rheingold

"If you can crack open that barcode and connect it to that open system" - Rheingold