This past summer Facebook relocated from University Avenue in Palo Alto, CA — where several buildings fan out along the downtown strip — to a new central office in Stanford Research Park. A good friend and two-year veteran of Facebook invited me to check out the new space. When I arrived, a security guard handed me a non-disclosure contract to fill out, a requirement to enter the building. “Just making sure you’re not a Twitter spy,” he said. I can therefore not describe the tour my friend gave, though photos of the new space abound on the Internet. Afterwards, we went out for a drink at the Dutch Goose, a bar popular with techies and Stanford graduate students, where most of this conversation took place. Though forthcoming, my friend was anxious to preserve her anonymity; Facebook employees, after all, know better than most the value of privacy. As she is not permitted to divulge company secrets, and would like to remain employed, her name has been omitted from this interview. It provides an interesting snapshot of the inner workings and culture of Facebook in the summer of 2009.

The Rumpus: On your servers, do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth?

Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment. The only reason we’re changing that is for performance reasons. When you make any sort of interaction on Facebook — upload a photo, click on somebody’s profile, update your status, change your profile information —

Rumpus: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?

Employee: That’s right. How do you think we know who your best friends are? But that’s public knowledge; we’ve explicitly stated that we record that. If you look in your type-ahead search, and you press “A,” or just one letter, a list of your best friends shows up. It’s no longer organized alphabetically, but by the person you interact with most, your “best friends,” or at least those whom we have concluded you are best friends with.

Rumpus: In other words, the person you stalk the most.

Employee: No, it’s more than just that. It’s also messages, file posts, photos you’re tagged in with them, as well as your viewing of their profile and all of that. Essentially, we judge how good of a friend they are to you.

Rumpus: When did Facebook make this change?

Employee: That was actually fairly recently, sometime in the last three months. But other than that, we definitely store snapshots, which is basically a picture of all the data on all of our servers. I want to say we do that every hour, of every day of every week of every month.

Rumpus: So this is every viewable screen?

Employee: It’s way more than that: it’s every viewable screen, with all the data behind every screen. So when we store your photos, we have six versions of your photos. We don’t store the original: we make six different versions on the photo uploader and upload those six versions.

Rumpus: And the difference between them would be sizing, certain areas are zoomed –

Employee: Exactly. Different sizes for the news feed, your profile pic, enlargement.

Rumpus: And these reside on servers in your office?

Employee: No, not in our office. Absolutely not. We have four data centers around the world. There’s one in Santa Clara, one in San Francisco, one in New York and one in London. And in each of those, there are approximately five to eight thousand servers. Each co-location of our servers has essentially the same data on it.

Rumpus: And how many users are you up to now?

Employee: That I can disclose publicly? Two hundred to two hundred twenty million.

Rumpus: And actually?

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In setting up Open Source Cinema, I was inspired by the open source software process – software that people can contribute to and change and collectively build. And I thought that idea applied really well to documentary film. I thought, why not set up something for collaboratively-produced truth?

Napster, the first widely popular peer-to-peer filesharing service, introduced the whole world to filesharing, which had already been happening in corners of the Internet, and in digital culture generally, from the beginning. Until the late 90s, it had been a marginal activity requiring technical knowhow, at that time mostly carried out in the arcane reaches of Usenet. Napster and similar services made it possible for anybody to share his or her entire music collection with any other user of the service, without needing any special skill.

As is well-known, the recording industry realized this posed a potentially serious threat to their business model, and the trade group representing the major record labels, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), sued Napster in 1999, and then in 2003 began a program of suing ordinary consumers for their filesharing activities, most infamously filing suit against grandmothers and small children. (The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2008 that the RIAA had discontinued this program.) Another potential target of lawsuits from the RIAA (and related trade groups) is a group of creators who, working with digital materials, use prior works as source material, just as creators have throughout history: taking an element here, an element there, and combining these borrowed elements into entirely new, individual works. This kind of culture — an increasingly-significant form called remix culture — is created under the perpetual threat of legal action, though it must be said that such action is very rare.

Brett Gaylor is a filmmaker who argues that these two phenomena — the reaction to filesharing and the threat to remix culture — are directly related, and he has made a film, largely based on the work of Lawrence Lessig, that calls for reform in intellectual property law: RiP: A Remix Manifesto. The Manifesto of the title consists of four points: 1. Culture always builds on the past; 2. The past always tries to control the future; 3. Our future is becoming less free; 4. To build free societies, you must limit the control of the past.

As those four points imply, the film moves from the special case of music into much wider issues raised by existing intellectual property law, touching “foreign trade, the kind of democracy we want to create,” and so forth. Since this interview was a conversation about the Internet, we minimized discussion of these wider issues — for example, Gaylor makes a compelling case that patent law is stifling medical innovation — in favor of discussing those issues that relate directly to the Internet.

But we discuss one other thing too: the way the film itself actually embodies these ideas about copyright and remix culture. Not only is the film released under a Creative Commons license; it was created alongside his innovative Open Source Cinema project — a website where documentary filmmakers can post the raw footage from their projects, and invite an audience to remix the footage and contribute it to the site. Gaylor found this collaborative process so successful with RiP that he has included dozens of viewer-contributed sequences in his many intermediate “final” cuts of the film. Infected with the remix spirit, Gaylor can’t seem to resist tweaking his own film with ever more contributions as time goes on. I’ve seen three versions — an early pre-release screener, a screening this past summer that was hosted by the San Francisco Film Society, and the Hulu version — and each was subtly different from the other two. He has vowed to release an all-time final version in 2010.

Gaylor lives in Montreal, but I caught him by phone at his childhood home on Galiano Island, where he regularly retreats to think and to relax. The first ten minutes of our interview was periodically interrupted by strange noises and popping sounds. I thought the connection was getting flaky, but it turned out that he was simply holding his wriggling infant daughter in one arm, and the noises were her laughter, and the accidental whacking of her father’s head and telephone with her flailing arms.

* *

The Rumpus: What was the genesis of this film? Did you set out to make a film version of Free Culture?

Brett Gaylor: Not exactly. The route was a little more circuitous than that, although that might have been easier than the path we ultimately took. Originally, I was really interested in peer-to-peer file sharing, not only as it pertained to the music industry, but also how the phenomenon was going to affect the world economy. When you saw how digital goods could be so easily copied and shared on the net, you knew this was going to really upset existing business models. So I wanted to make a film that would explore those ideas.

But even before that, I was really involved in digital culture. I grew up here on Galiano Island, which is a very tiny place, and dialing a BBS was the only way for me to access the larger world. For anybody about my age (I’m 32) who was interested in technology when they were growing up, to be on the internet then, twenty years ago, meant using your modem to dial a BBS.

Rumpus: I remember those! I’m your exact contemporary, and I had the same experience in the Silicon Valley, dialing a local BBS.

Gaylor: Right, and anybody who had that experience of being on the early Internet, knew that this was going to change the world and would disrupt things. As that began to happen, I wanted to make a film about that change, and which specifically became about how we were going to have to rethink copyright. It was about a 6-year process to make the film, and it took me several years at the beginning just to find the nuance and the flavor of activism I was interested in. It sort of crystallized when I discovered Lawrence Lessig’s writing and Free Culture, and so obviously one of my early interviews and characters was him. But I struggled for a long time on how to make a film that wasn’t just a talking heads survey film.

Girl Talk Attempting to Concentrate

Rumpus: I guess that’s where Girl Talk comes in.

Gaylor: That’s right. I’d been aware of his music for many years, because I often used it in demos, and even back around 2003 or 2004 there were little clips of him online, and they were like, this skinny guy playing to ten people in a laundromat in Kentucky. And I loved that, but I didn’t know it was going to turn into what it did. Then once he came through Montreal, and I just thought, “well, he’s here and I like his music, so why don’t I film a show, and maybe it will show up as an interview somewhere in the film.”

And at that show, there was one of those moments when all these people run up on stage, and it turned into this amazing party. I thought, okay, this is great, because you can see, embodied in that act of the fans jumping up on stage, the breaking of that traditional boundary between an artist and a fan.

Rumpus: It was a visual metaphor for everything your film is about.

Gaylor: Yes, exactly, and you struggle with that so often in documentary filmmaking, especially if you want to make something theatrical, as I did. By then I’d raised money, and had managed to convince people that there’s something to this debate and people will want to watch it, but I was still looking for that subject you could follow over time. After that show, that’s when we engaged with Girl Talk, and then told Lessig we wanted to try and portray his ideas cinematically, not just as a talking-heads picture, and got him to do one last lecture on the subject at Stanford.

Rumpus: Since it seems you didn’t start out with Lessig’s ideas in mind, at what point did you develop the manifesto that structures the film?

Gaylor: The manifesto itself was one of the last things I did, actually. We spent a long time in the edits, about ten months, and we were still missing something to tie it all together. When we were brainstorming titles, I thought, why not A Remix Manifesto? I liked the ring of it, and my editor’s reaction was: “okay then, what’s the manifesto?” And I didn’t know. So I took ten days, went back to Galiano Island, and did nothing but think about that.

And I realized, in a way, that the manifesto was already embedded in the film — it had subconsciously had been there the whole time. It was based on something that Lessig had written before Free Culture, this speech about how creativity always builds on the past. So I tweaked that a little, and my version gave me the wire on which to hang my personal take on the film. Because prior to that, it hadn’t quite gelled, and it didn’t seem motivated.

Rumpus: I’d like to talk about your Open Source Cinema project, where you post your own footage and invite people to remix it. When did you get the idea for this project and set it up?

Gaylor: Pretty much immediately, while we were making the film, I was inspired by the open source software process – software that people can contribute to and change and collectively build. And I thought that applied really well to documentary film for a number of reasons. There’s this notion that democracy happens under bright lights, and again there’s that famous quote from Linus Torvalds: “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” So I thought, why not set up something for collaboratively-produced truth?

This was before Wikipedia, though Wikipedia really proved you can have this sort of collective wisdom happen. But at the time I thought of it, it was more or less impossible. There were no large video sharing sites like YouTube, there were no social networks, so at the time I did it to the extent I could do it, and I would kind of put my rushes up under Creative Commons licenses, and invite people to edit them around themes.

What ended up happening, was that as soon as Girl Talk came into the project, Open Source Cinema really took off, because not only did Girl Talk have an existing fanbase, but those fans were already involved with digital culture and remixing.

Rumpus: I understand that many sequences in the film are remixes contributed by fans. Could you name a prominent example of that?

Gaylor: Yes. The rotoscoped Girl Talk concert sequence is a great example of that. There were three levels of collaboration there: I posted my original rushes, and then one person made a short video out of those, and then like seventy kids got together and each rotoscoped five frames of that video and compiled it. And actually there was a fourth level, because that version was remixed as well, and we used one of those remixes in the film. And we’ve used a number of such sequences throughout.

But this experiment was just the first step. What I want to do now with Open Source Cinema, is make it into a collaborative platform that any documentary filmmaker could use, anybody who wants to invite that sort of participation.

Rumpus: So you’re actively trying to get other filmmakers on board?

Gaylor: Yeah, that’s sort of the focus of my next work: trying to bring other filmmakers into creating with their audiences, and to promote the idea that sharing can be good and sharing can actually bear a lot of creative fruit.

Rumpus: So you have decided to do this with the source material of all your feature films, release it on this platform?

Gaylor: I would think so. For sure. It’s been very rewarding.

Rumpus: Some people might think you’re getting free labor from your fans.

Gaylor: A lot of people think this would result in a reduction of work, but that hasn’t been my experience. I think you’re at least doubling your work when you invite a lot of other people into your project. But it’s the way I’ve always enjoyed creating. Filmmaking is different from the other arts. Remember Orson Welles: “A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.” That has always been true of filmmaking, it’s a very collaborative thing. I just like the idea that with this approach, the audience has some input, and it’s a way to keep things fresh. And I’ve also had the experience of people watching the film and coming up afterwards to say: “hey, I made that thing!” or “that’s me in the frame!” It’s cool! I’ll definitely do it with all my future projects.

Brett Gaylor

Rumpus: For a moment I’d like to ask you about the difference between filesharing and creative reuse. Although I agree with your general perspective, I have to admit I was a little surprised at the way the film appears to conflate filesharing and the wholesale theft of creative work, with remixing and creative reuse of prior works. Those seem to me entirely different things. Are you making the argument that filesharing should also be 100% decriminalized?

Gaylor: Well, I was focusing on documenting the excessive reaction to filesharing, rather than trying to make some kind of blanket argument about it. Is filesharing going to be a technology that sticks around? I don’t know anything about that. But I do know that there was a real opportunity missed in the reaction. Rather than celebrate the technology that allowed this instant access to recorded music, and to potentially bottomless markets, it was really vilified. The way they approached it, was like throwing people in jail for jaywalking, and it really hasn’t helped the case for paying for recorded music.

In the film I definitely look at that, and examine how the reaction to filesharing has departed from historical reactions to new technologies. There are so many examples of technologies that have disrupted existing business models, particularly in music and in film. Take the radio, the player piano, the VCR, cable television — initially these were all very disruptive, and there were lawsuits involved, but in time legislators would dictate how to solve the problem. The radio will never go go away no matter how often the American Federation of Musicians goes on strike. So they established payment structures, and from then on people worked within that system. And in my view, that’s what needs to happen with peer to peer filesharing. There needs to be some kind of collective licensing system set up. Perhaps it could be a percentage of an ISP bill or something.

Rumpus: In Free Culture, Lessig cites the example of cable TV.

Gaylor: Sure, or maybe some other kind of arrangement will win out. The reason I chose to compare those in the film, that it’s this kind of extreme reaction to those technologies that is threatening the remix culture. And not only the remix culture, but any business models that may emerge from these technologies. Because there’s still a lot of money to be made from the existing structure.

The thing is, when we upload content — mashups, remixes, political satire, any of that kind of stuff – to Facebook and YouTube, if it’s taken down, it’s because of this reaction to filesharing, not because of an objection to remix culture per se. So even though you might make a moral distinction between the two activities, they are closely related. That’s why the film goes into them that way. I agree that the filesharing side is more morally uncertain, and on the other side I think that a lot of people are happy to say that remixing is a valid art form and there should be room in the law for it. But people, particularly those who work in creative industries, aren’t so sure how to deal with filesharing.

You know something, this has happened in the distribution of this very film. I’m dealing with a lot of people who are wondering how we’re going to make any money on this thing, or even just recoup the money, when it’s right there on the bloody Pirate Bay! But my answer to that has always been, it’s not piracy I need to be afraid of; it’s obscurity. The problem is not that people are ripping off my film, it’s that nobody’s heard of my film, it’s a tiny little film. And that’s why I was very insistent that my film be released under Creative Commons license, and that it be free to travel through those networks.

Rumpus: When you said you were trying to highlight the excessive reaction to filesharing, I thought of another really powerful metaphorical moment in the film: the scene where an RIAA lobbyist was bullying a group of kids. Not only was it a very direct metaphor for the whole situation – the music industry, suing children – I was really struck by something else: the way he said, as an aside, that he wished he owned the rights to the idea of love. Which was a subtle but chilling moment for me. It made me recognize how extreme the thinking around intellectual property can get, that there are in fact people who, if they could, would try to monopolize expressions of one of the most basic and universal of human experiences, for financial profit.

Gaylor: That guy was delivered from heaven, or filmmaking heaven anyway. That was actually outside the Grokster hearings, which was a Supreme Court case in 2005, that a lot of people went to and protested, and that guy was actually from the American Federation of Musicians, or Songwriter’s Federation, I think. He was a lobbyist, but not from the RIAA, but he was in fact trucked in by the RIAA, along with a lot of other musicians, to speak for them. Because the RIAA wanted to try and come across as representing the poor struggling songwriter. He was really just kidding around: “I don’t own the rights to the concept of love — I wish I did, I’d be a rich man,” but yeah, it was a telling moment. And the kids are staring at him like, “I don’t understand a thing that’s coming out of your mouth.” This guy could be saying “Did you know that you’re supposed to be paying for air? There’s supposed to be a box installed in your house that pays for your air, and I don’t know if your parents have been paying for the air, but they should be,” it was sort of like that, and these kids were like, WHAT. As if, just because you wrote a song, you should be –

Rumpus: That we owe you a living.

Gaylor: Yes, basically. For me, it was more telling that this was an industry that was really out of touch with, not just what’s going on, but actually with their place in the world. Here was this guy who writes jingles, and he believes that he has the right to dictate a really fundamental part of our economy, that touches not just his jingle writing, but also foreign trade, the kind of democracy that we want to create, a lot more than just his little songs. And so, I think it was, for me, more an indication of that, than of the extremism you mention.

But that does exist too. The fellow we talked to in Washington, Bruce Lehmann, was a lot more along those lines. In the Clinton administration, the official thinking he spearheaded was that if we can move up the value chain, so to speak, and stop putting primary importance on the manufacture of goods, how far abstracted can we go? Can we patent life itself? For me that was really a lot more scary. And depressing, when you realize that much of the economic situation we’re in right now has come as a result of that kind of thinking, where they started from the idea of dismantling manufacturing because we’re all going to get rich off these ideas. That really made me realize that copyright, and intellectual property law in general, is a much bigger issue than just the entertainment industry.

Rumpus: Given that the film is so much about digital culture, what kind of digital distribution are you pursuing? Are you going to let it be distributed entirely for free, or are you pursuing paid downloads as well?

Gaylor: Well, this has been really complicated because of the way film rights are handled from country to country. The world has been carved up into a lot of different territories. So one distribution company might have the download rights for one country but not for another. But as a matter of fact, the US is really the only mature download market for movies. The global rights for the film are with the National Film Board of Canada, because they’re our producer. They put in enough money to make the film, and the tradeoff was that they would take the global rights. So they sold download rights to companies in some countries that just don’t have the infrastructure to support paid downloads, and Apple is really the only real player in that space, and in some countries, like Canada for instance, you can’t really get in there. You can’t access it. So that’s been frustrating a little bit. But like I said, in the States they took this whole innovative approach of doing a pay-what-you-can download, and it’s also on iTunes and Hulu. In the States, you have more opportunity to see what’s really going on in the digital marketplace. The sad state of affairs of digital distribution is that there’s really only one mature market, which is frustrating too. Even though it’s rising at a fast clip, digital downloads of movies is still less than 10% of all sales.

Rumpus: You have a lot of people on Hulu complaining that you don’t present a balanced viewpoint.

Gaylor: Come on, it’s a manifesto. It says so right in the title. I didn’t even want to pretend that it would be “balanced,” whatever that would mean in this case. Manifestoes are not unbiased, and they don’t tend to be subtle things. They don’t try and play the devil’s advocate: they present the views of one side.

Rumpus: Speaking of manifestoes, I love the Cannibalist Manifesto from 1928 that you quote at the end, after telling the story that when the first Portuguese bishop arrived in Brazil, the natives were so impressed with the word of God, they ate the man in order to fully assimilate the power of the Catholic Church: “Only cannibalism unites us, socially, economically, philosophically. From the French Revolution to romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution, we’re moving right along.”

Gaylor: I found that very early in the research. I knew that Brazil was going to have a place in the film early on. The Cannibalist Manifesto is quite a poetic statement on remixing, but it was an inspiration for sure.

Rumpus: So on that subject, do you think it’s ultimately going to be a place like Canada, or a place like Brazil, that finally poses the most effective challenge to the extremes of US IP law?

Gaylor: As a Canadian, I’d like to think it would come from Canada, but unfortunately, we’re in a situation where, because we’re a cultural importer from the United States, we kind of have to toe whatever line the US demands. But you never know. Things are changing, and people are beginning to realize what is at stake, and Canada has been dragging its feet on copyright for so many years because it’s a really contentious issue. So maybe we’ll have a chance to get it right up here.

But realistically, I think the most serious challenges will come from the developing world. This was explained to me quite succinctly by Claudio Prado, who is a digital culture policymaker in Brazil; he said, “you know, in the developing world, we didn’t have the luxuries of the 20th century. So we actually moved right from the 19th century into the 21st century, because we were locked out of the 20th century.” The 20th century was exclusively the realm of the first world, and all of the money and economic structures that were set up during that time, the rest of the world was excluded from. So they’re not feeling the same pain of having those industries taken away from them, because they didn’t actually get to participate in that economy. As a result, they’re actually a lot closer to a 21st century model than we are, because they’re able to move more quickly; they don’t carry the same baggage that we do from the 20th century. So I think the most potent challenges are definitely going to continue coming from there.

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The aim of this series is to examine the ways in which culture is evolving as a result of the Internet and the Web, and it features interviews with academics, journalists, technical people, and creators who have deep knowledge and insight into the cultural issues that have been raised, in the past fifteen years, by this particular set of technologies.

Subjects so far have been Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, blogging expert Scott Rosenberg, and this morning’s feature, Jonathan Zittrain, who has studied the ways in which the Internet is becoming less free. And we have upcoming interviews with Brett Gaylor and Katherine Hayles.

The Rumpus has a short list of key subjects whom we’ll definitely be featuring in the months ahead, but we’d like to get your input too.

If you’d like to suggest a subject, simply leave a comment on this post; if you’d like to inquire about contributing, send an email with the subject line “Conversations about the Internet” to the series editor, Jeremy Hatch, at jeremy (at) therumpus (dot) net.

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I think we’re really at a place where it’s hard to predict the future, where governments haven’t fully realized just how much power is falling into their laps, nor have people realized how much power they stand to lose.

“Today’s Internet is not the only way to build a network,” Jonathan Zittrain writes in the first chapter of his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. The open-access, public Internet was developed by “government researchers and computer scientists who had no CEO, no master business plan, no paying subscribers, no investment in content, and no financial interest in accumulating subscribers,” and largely because of this, it was able to develop “quietly and organically,” ultimately “crushing” the proprietary networks, like AOL, that were developed and deployed at the same time. The smart money was on the proprietary networks, and the smart money lost.

But that wasn’t inevitable, and Zittrain argues that the open Internet is on the path to being effectively closed down — taking with it the technical and cultural innovation and freedom online that we have come to take for granted. The popularity of proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and “tethered” devices like the Kindle and the iPhone — which can’t be easily modified by the user, can often be controlled remotely, and sometimes have even been used for surveillance — are threatening the dominance of “generative” devices and platforms, like PCs and Wikipedia, which are general-purpose and encourage unexpected innovation and use.

As Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a faculty co-director at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (which he helped found), Zittrain is a pioneer in the field of “Internet law” or “cyber law.” In addition to the issues described above, his research interests also include the battles over control of digital content, cryptography, electronic privacy, online civility, and the creation of online communities.

Catie Disabato recently interviewed Mr. Zittrain about these subjects, and we are pleased to present it as the third installment of this series. –JH

The Rumpus: What’s the terminology you use to describe the kind of law you practice? Do you call it Internet law or cyber law?

Jonathan Zittrain: I’m not that orthodox about the terminology. A lot of the time, the type of law I practice can simply address any questions that arise involving the internet or the part of the law involving the internet. A lot of people also take it much more broadly. It can mean all of the questions that can shape people’s behavior, and the opportunities that they have, and the restrictions that they face, online.

Rumpus: What are your thoughts on politeness and kindness in the ways people interact on the Internet?

Zittrain: I’ve been pretty amazed at the ways in which certain projects online rely on cooperation and kindness to succeed. And they get those things. They just trust that if they fall backwards, generally, there’s someone there to catch them, or there are more people wanting to catch them than wanting to see them fall. And that’s pretty amazing. This is certainly true for the way in which the Internet generally works and the way in which it was begun.

For example, the way internet routing works, in part, depends on so-called “peers” that will be there to get your data the rest of the way to its destination. There might be ten or fifteen intermediate hops to get the data to its destination, and it all comes together. It’s a model that’s much less nailed down than, say, the simplicity of a FedEx package going from somewhere to somewhere, where you pay FedEx money and then it’s the job of FedEx to get it there. It’s interesting to see the ways in which Internet routing requires certain kinds of cooperation that most other network formats don’t.

And then you see the replication of that in other forms. On Wikipedia, there are more people out there obsessed with eliminating vandalism, than there are people determined to be vandals. Which is pretty incredible. There are people out there who just want the articles to look nice.

Rumpus: I guess the general stereotype about “people nowadays” is that we’re isolated and unkind and closed off. Why do you think this kind of neighborly friendliness appears on something as ostensibly dissociated as the Internet?

Zittrain: I think that there can be a real power to habit and tradition. Traditions start off in backwater websites, among people that know each other, or who are already more trusting of each other because they’re in a backwater. They share that security in common, the way that joggers nod heads at each other at six in the morning, because the crooks don’t get up that early. There are traditions, like Halloween and Trick-or-Treating, where you allow strangers to fill your bag with candy, and despite the stories you hear — the impossible story of the razor blade in the apple — you more or less trust them, and with good reason. There was a time when hitchhiking worked that way.

So once people discover a site like Wikipedia, and it’s already working a certain way, it continues with those traditions. There’s somebody here in San Francisco who does something called Cupcake Camp, where people make, exhibit, and share cupcakes with each other. There are cupcakes everywhere, and so far there is no worry about food security. Once health concerns start to gnaw at you, it can unravel the whole enterprise, but the force of habit can also keep it going.

I also think that there’s a certain feeling that you can get if you’re part of a larger project. You see a project, and you give a little bit to it, and you see it get better, and others you know are giving to it, and it becomes a community. That is a very powerful force to contemplate, once it gets going. It’s too bad that many people, when they think of online message boards and communities, they only think of the ones that are the most under their noses, which are the comments section after an article on a major news site. Which are pretty much, you know, set up to fail.

Rumpus: One would argue that those are not really communities.

Zittrain: Right, I think that they’re not. It’s not a sense of identity. Nobody would say: I’m a CNN dot com commenter, that’s who I am. Whereas there are plenty of people who, in fact, say: I am a Wikipedian. Not just, I am a volunteer for this organization called Wikipedia. They say I am a Wikipedian. Wikipedia and I are one.

The Rumpus: I grew up with LiveJournal, and the culture of the communities there was: you don’t break the rules, and if you do break the rules, you get kicked out.

Zittrain: I think for any of these communities, as they get more popular, and as the technologies that depend on communities get more popular, at some point you face this question about what to do about bad apples. Once the village strikes gold or gets on the map as a tourist destination, the big pockets start to arrive, and you can’t just keep singing kumbaya louder. That’s why I actually see one of the central questions of cyber law as being, how can we design technologies that facilitate communities that have a certain immunity to bad apples?

Rumpus: Could you expand on the difference between a “tethered” device and a “generative” device?

Zittrain: For the past thirty years we’ve had a generative device in front of us, the PC, whether it’s at home or at work or the library or at school. We’ve had a device that can be programmed for any purpose. And it’s been connected to a network that hasn’t had any gatekeeping either; you can visit any website you want, and those websites can give you an experience that represents the software. I think, because it’s been such a dominant feature of the landscape, we take it for granted, but that’s a totally radical technology configuration. It was not destined to be that way, it has advanced to be that way. There were proprietary networks in the 80s and 90s, where to do things with them you needed the permission of the proprietor.

I believe that the past 30 years has been an incredible time for innovation, incredibly disruptive in a way. As the Internet has gone mainstream, and as more and more bad apples have shown up (particularly malware authors), a reasonable craving for stability has arisen. One way to achieve that stability is to create technology environments that are more locked down, where the proprietor determines how it will work and how it won’t work. And that’s true of a new range of digital devices that are in front of us.

That method works, but it has a lot of drawbacks. Our work computer, more often than not, is locked down by the IT manager; you can’t just run any code on it. At home, you might find yourself playing a video game on a box that also connects to the Internet, but the software on it requires a licensing agreement between the software maker and the box maker, and you can’t just directly go to the software maker and get it running.

The iPhone is, of course, a good example of this too. It started out as completely just Apple, 100 percent, and then a year later they introduced third party applications, just like a PC — except that Apple vets them. There are good reasons why that’s a functioning business model, but there are also reasons why it positions Apple to control what’s going on for their subscribers in a way that is kind of unprecedented.

Not only does this mean that the proprietors of the devices have more options than they did to prevent their devices from being hacked in ways that don’t always benefit the users — it also means the government suddenly has a new means of regulating. If the issue at hand is file sharing, and a company like Apple approves an app that enables that somehow, they can go to that company and say: “we don’t like this app you approved, and we order you to kill it.” Whereas with a PC, nobody ever talks to a Microsoft and orders them to kill a third-party program, because Microsoft has no control over either third-party programs or what people do with PCs. If what you don’t like is peer-to-peer file sharing, this is a happy occasion: no more Wild West, or a lot less of it. But if it remains unbalanced, if you see the possibilities for government control as giving them a little too much power, then there’s something to worry about.

The Rumpus: I want to ask you a question based on something you wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times, where you worried that our increasing reliance on cloud computing — where our data and applications are kept online, on company servers — has the potential to compromise our ability to innovate, our personal privacy, and opens up vast potential for surveillance. You concluded: “we’ve only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That’s not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.” However, the rest of your op-ed, and the title of your book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, seems to contradict the idea of “not turning around.”

Zittrain: It might well be that it’s sensible to have your data in the cloud rather than on your device, all else being equal. But when you start entrusting your data to a third party, it does raise a bunch of issues, and I think this is the time to fix it before things get too routine and habit takes over. There even are some emerging technologies that can make cloud computing privacy-enhanced and more secure. It’s just a question of whether people will know to ask for it.

The Rumpus: What are those technologies?

Zittrain: It includes things like having your data automatically encrypted online so that the cloud computing provider, if told by the government that it is has to turn over everything in your space on their cloud, they would say: here it is, but good luck getting anything out of it because it’s all encrypted. That’s just a small example, but it’s an example of a way to make cloud computing more privacy-enhanced. For a cloud computing provider, they’re not exactly that excited about that. That’s in part because if you want to search all of your Yahoo mail for the past month, it has to be unencrypted for Yahoo computers to be able to scan it and tell you what they find.

But it turns out that some technologies that are starting to emerge, make it possible for your data to be encrypted and still searchable. I would like to see people find ways to reconcile the genuine values of privacy and the autonomy of people, with the convenience of having their stuff in the cloud.

Rumpus: Do you think that sort of thing could, or would, catch on? Or do you think the powers-that-be are using this opportunity to get rid of some of the expectations of privacy?

Zittrain: I think it’s up in the air right now. I think many governments have seen the value of the Internet and don’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Some governments are farther ahead than others in seeing and exploiting the opportunities for surveillance and control. The government of China, famously, uses a lot of filtering on the Internet, and it has a whole structure in place that gets intermediaries and gatekeepers to self-filter. If you host a chat service in China, you’ll have monitors in the chat rooms who throw people out if they say anything subversive.

There’s a certain value to coming up with ways to allow people to get around that, to have a fabric of technology that prevents a single regulator from taking control with a single order. I think we’re really at a place where it’s hard to predict the future, where governments haven’t fully realized just how much power is falling into their laps, nor have people realized how much power they stand to lose.

The Rumpus: If we don’t use these emerging technologies to protect the individual user’s privacy on the Internet, do you think the Internet will become a more dangerous place?

Zittrain: There are a lot of variables and a lot of equations. I think it could become a less secure place if you are an outlier in any way. I think a lot of people depend for their privacy on just being another grain of sand on the beach. But if you are supportive of an opposition candidate, it can be very tempting for the government, the incumbent — in the name of national security and prevention of subversion — to try to figure out who’s with them and who’s against them. The fact is, you can go from a fairly tolerant rights-respecting state to one that just isn’t. Think of Richard Nixon, and what power he might have had if he could just call up the FBI and say, I need you to do this, that, and the other thing. He’d have a lot more power today. That’s something that I just try to structurally protect against.

Rumpus: I’ve started to believe that people don’t expect the Internet to be a private place; what I’ve been taught is that if you don’t want someone to read it, don’t put it on the Internet.

Zittrain: I think when you ask people flat out, they would agree with you, but then they don’t seem very regretful of their actions online. It just shows that it’s hard to bear that in mind at all times. As to keeping things off the net, well — in a way, that’s a rule of paranoia so flat that you have to ignore it. It’s like saying, if you don’t want to be surveilled you better go live in a cabin in rural Montana. Well, is that really my choice? In a way, that level of caution is really just a prescription for complacency because the flip side to it is: nothing I can do will make a difference.

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What motivates bloggers? They care. It’s as simple as that. To a lot of journalists that comes as a shock, because for many (not all) it’s just a job, and it’s a job they’ve been doing many years, and they’re jaded.

In 1995, Scott Rosenberg left a job at the San Francisco Examiner to take a chance on forming a new kind of media company, a magazine that would be published entirely on the World Wide Web. You may have heard of it — it was Salon — but the subject of this interview is something else that was beginning to emerge around the same time: blogging, as a practice and as a form.

Rosenberg has written a history of the subject called Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. In the course of it he observes that, although blogs have only been around for ten to fifteen years, they have already become “the dominant media form online.” In fact, blogs have become such an ordinary and seemingly unremarkable part of our daily lives, it can be difficult to remember the single most important fact about them: they are among the most revolutionary and disruptive technologies that have so far emerged from the Internet and the World Wide Web. In principle, they have made an extraordinary power available to everybody: the power to widely publish one’s thoughts at little to no cost. And that ability, extended by the social media that grew out of blogging, has been steadily reshaping our world ever since.

Say Everything, in large part, tells the individual stories of early bloggers, because those pioneers were the first to face the kind of questions that would later become widespread: If you blog about your private life, what constitutes oversharing? Will blogging get you fired? Are you really a journalist if all your work appears on your own blog? What even counts as a blog, anyway? And that perennial favorite: Can anybody even make money from this thing?

After the case histories, Rosenberg draws back for a wider view. In three wonderful chapters of analysis, he offers his take on the meaning of all that has gone before, and attempts to address the larger questions in his subtitle. The ideas found in these final chapters — particularly his bravura chapter, “Journalists vs. Bloggers” — were the focus of our interview.

We met at a popular cafe in Berkeley, where upon seeing my recorder he immediately suggested we move to a table he knew to be quieter: “I always feel bad for the transcriptionist,” he said, “especially when he’s the journalist too.”

The Rumpus: People casually use the word ‘blog’ to denote many different forms of online publishing, everything from personal online diaries, to group blogs, to sites that aggregate news alongside a group blog, like the Huffington Post. So the first thing I wanted to ask was the most obvious question: what exactly are you talking about, when you talk about ‘blogs’?

Scott Rosenberg: Recently Jay Rosen claimed that the term ‘blogger’ has become so broad as to be meaningless, and perhaps you could extend that to the term ‘blog’ as well. But I don’t think that’s exactly true. When I use the word, I think of it having a formal definition on the one hand, and a meaning that is more historical and ideological on the other.

As you know, you could ask “What do you mean when you say ‘a novel’?” Any form has a definition that, if you took specific examples and diagrammed them as you would a network, there would be a cluster in the center with things that have all of the characteristics from some core definition — characteristics that all novels share — and around that cluster, at different distances, are things that have some of these characteristics but not all of them. You might call them all novels, even the ones quite distant from the core. And the same applies to the term ‘blog.’

The formal definition is not etched in stone, but I think it’s pretty clear, and it is something that wasn’t invented so much as it has evolved. So its boundaries have expanded and maybe will contract in some ways over time. Formally, we’re talking about personal websites that are organized in reverse chronological order and that usually, though not always, have lots of links. And that’s a useful and valuable definition to have.

But there’s also this whole set of ideas and attitudes and behaviors that we associate with the practice of bloggers, and that’s a little more elusive and complicated and subjective. But you can’t just shove this aside and say the formal definition is the only one that matters. You have to deal with it because when people hear the word, it triggers these associations too. Now, they’re different from listener to listener, and these differing associations cause endless confusion and problems.

Rumpus: I’m sure we all can agree that pajamas are involved.

Rosenberg: That’s not quite what I’m getting at. A quick, short list of the associations I mean would include things like personal authenticity; although you do have the counter-example there of anonymous blogging. There’s disintermediation; that is, “I’m going to tell my own story and not let the media tell it.” There’s a kind of rebellious attitude: “this is my expertise and I’m sick of seeing it misrepresented in the press, and here’s the truth as I see it.” There’s more, but those are some of the key things. In a way, the whole of Say Everything is an exploration of that side of things.

The thing is, the form of blogging is so useful and flexible, you can’t resist using it if you’re publishing on the web. When we were talking before, you characterized the Rumpus as a blog, but when we founded Salon 12 years ago, we didn’t have that term, so we called it an online magazine.

Rumpus: Well, I said it runs on WordPress. We actually call the Rumpus an online magazine as well. One stream is in fact a blog, with multiple authors, but we also have a homepage that features longer original pieces for a while, by people who don’t necessarily contribute to the blog per se. So that aspect is more like a magazine. What you’re mostly talking about in this book is the single-author, single-stream site.

Rosenberg: Yes, the single-author site is part of the core definition, but I don’t think the form is limited to that. Because even when you have a multi-author blog, whether it’s something like Gawker or something like BoingBoing, each individual blogger usually has an identity, and usually has the freedom to write personally, more personally than in traditional media.

This gets complicated further as traditional media adds blogging to their operations. You know, the New York Times has at least seventy blogs right now. Those people are obviously doing something related to what we’ve been talking about, but it’s not identical. They’re more likely to be edited, for example. And the personal voice is more narrowly limited: for a Times reporter, writing on a Times blog is freer than writing for the paper. But it’s still a lot less free than writing on your personal blog. So here you have the formal definition coming into a little bit of conflict with the ideological baggage, and that confuses people because people say, “Now that the New York Times has blogs, blogging has gone mainstream!” Well, yes and no.

Rumpus: Speaking of the Times, I’d like to dig into the ideas in your chapter, “Journalists vs. Bloggers.” In those pages, you make a convincing argument that the entire debate — as reported in major media, anyway — can be understood as a story constructed around the insecurities and fears of older journalists. You characterize much of it as special pleading and even “thumbsucking,” and you write that bloggers and journalists aren’t really enemies but “more like feuding cousins, squabbling over a family legacy: Who gets to call himself a journalist? Who should readers trust?”

So who does get to call himself a journalist? What credentials do you need to do journalism?

Rosenberg: Until the web arrived, credentials were a by-product of your employment and the institution that supported your work as a journalist and paid your salary. And that was it. There was no real question about it. If you asked for a press pass to an event, you needed letterhead from your employer or something, and there were these things called press cards, ID cards for journalists, if you can imagine that concept! They still exist for police lines and such, I think, but back then it was the norm for everything.

Then the web comes along and simultaneously undermines the economic basis for those salaries that are providing the credentials, and provides the tools for people without the paycheck to do the work that only the credentialed people were doing before. So this question has been blurred on two different axes, the credentialing by employment, and the actual work.

That is basically where we are today. There has been no clarifying of that blurred picture, and I don’t know that there ever will be. I recommend Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody, in which he writes in far greater detail than I did about the legal confusion we now face when anyone is potentially a journalist at any moment.

Rumpus: Like with the Josh Wolf case.

Rosenberg: That’s one of the canonical examples, but there are many more. And you basically see two different reactions to this.

One is a desire to somehow build a dam and block all this stuff because it’s too overwhelming, because we don’t know how to process the volume of information that is potentially available to us from every citizen with a cell phone and every writer with a blog, and therefore we need to turn back the clock and get the government to subsidize newspapers so we still have newspapers.

Obviously, I think this is folly, and the other reaction, which I share in, is the hope that we’ll continue to find interesting, helpful ways to surface the valuable stuff in this torrential flow of information. Will we also end up with the kind of individual situations where bad information hoodwinks us? Of course!

Rumpus: Well, that happens on television more than anywhere else.

Rosenberg: Yeah, it does. And the worst failures happen at the connection between the new stuff and the old. The worst informational trainwrecks happen where traditional journalists, who still have a very powerful megaphone but are not as well-versed in the ways of the online world — somehow something lands on their desk and before they know it they’ve done something foolish.

For example, at the very beginning of the web era, Pierre Salinger, this grand man of the old media establishment, came forth one day late in 1996 and said that he had evidence that the US Navy had shot down TWA flight 800, which had crashed earlier that year. And because he was the one saying it, it made headlines. A few hours later, he took the documents to the FBI and the FBI said, “actually, this stuff has been bouncing around the Internet for the last few months and we’ve already debunked them.” And in the meantime I was on the WELL, which was the first real online community, and people there were saying “boy, we hope that Salinger isn’t talking about this stuff that we already know is bogus.” And this kind of thing continues to happen.

Rumpus: Well, that’s a nice segue into the other question posed earlier. Who should readers trust? How does a reader go about evaluating a blog for trustworthiness? How is that similar to the way people evaluate other media, or how they evaluated media before the age of mass broadcast?

Rosenberg: It used to be that you had this proxy for trust, which was the brand of the media outlet. And that worked fairly well, although there would be these periodic breakdowns; the biggest in recent memory would be the Iraq war buildup. But in general it was a useful mechanism. And the same mechanism applies with blogs, on a much smaller level. Each blog has a brand. A reader of political blogs knows that Talking Points Memo is pretty trustworthy, for example.

But there are several differences. The visual cues are less useful than they used to be, because anyone can publish a blog that looks like almost any other blog. So you can’t rely on that. But in place of that kind of superficial thing is a whole set of other criteria that more readers are coming to understand. The most important of these would be links, reputation, and comments.

Links are about verifying the blogger’s use of sources. If it’s a blog that’s purporting to present public information, is the blogger linking to sources or not? If there are no links, or if they do link, but the information seems to conflict with what you’ve read on the blog, that’s a sign of untrustworthiness.

The overall reputation of the blogger is another factor. Does the blogger tell you who he or she is? Google the person and figure out what other people think. Does the person state their identity, or do they blog anonymously? Sometimes there are good reasons for anonymous blogging — whistleblowers are an example of that. But in general it’s a bad sign if they’re blogging anonymously and you can’t see any good reason for it.

And another indicator is the comments. Are there any? Are the commenters engaged in an interesting, substantive discussion? If the comments are filled with spam, it’s likely that the posts are spam too, because nobody’s tending the garden.

Sometimes I feel a little foolish saying these things, because it seems like common sense. But I think it’s helpful to repeat. We’re at a point in history where there’s a smaller group of people who do this second nature, and a wider group of people who are still learning.

Rumpus: I’d like to talk about the role of the blogger as gadfly. In that chapter, you cite a number of examples where a major media source either decided to drop a story, incorrectly reported a detail, or got the story completely wrong, and dedicated, gleeful, outraged bloggers — one or the other or all three — kept it alive or fact-checked it until the journalists in question, or their employers, are forced to acknowledge it. You write (and I really like this line): “Journalists found many reasons to detest bloggers, but their most consistently irksome trait was their relentlessness.” Most bloggers don’t earn money from this intensive work, so what does motivate them?

Rosenberg: They care. It’s as simple as that. To a lot of journalists that comes as a shock, because for many (not all) it’s just a job, and it’s a job they’ve been doing many years, and they’re jaded.

In the chapter, I wrote about how Joe Klein got some details wrong in his reporting on the FISA courts, and that was a crystallization of this. Here are all these bloggers outraged by this relatively minor error, and there you had Klein sitting there saying, “I don’t have time to deal with this.” As a practicing journalist and a former managing editor, I know exactly what he’s talking about: he doesn’t have time to deal with that, and most of his readers didn’t care about his errors either. But then you have this claim of the traditional media that they are more reliable, that they are taking a last stand on the quality of their information. It’s pretty damning when they have to admit that they don’t always have time to get it right!

There is this constant refrain in the journalism-blogging dialogue, about how we need to support the institutions of journalism because bloggers don’t have the resources that a real newsroom has. The classic example is the Baghdad Bureau of the New York Times, which costs millions of dollars a year, and reporters are putting their lives on the line to go there, and bloggers are less likely to do that.

That’s all true, but you can also say that actually, newsrooms have very limited resources. I know this as a managing editor: you have X number of people, and X cubed number of stories: you’re constantly making difficult choices about what to cover and what not to cover; you’re constantly thinking about how you’re deploying your troops; you’re always thinking about how you’re spending your limited newshole.

The news world is a world of constrained resources. That’s more so today, but it has always been like that. And the blogger who cares about some particular subject really doesn’t have the same constraints.

Rumpus: He has all the spare time in the world.

Rosenberg: Yes, if he has the spare time. And perhaps our rhetorical blogger only cares about reviewing the baked goods in his community, and who cares about that. But if you assemble the patchquilt of all of these concerns, you find that the coverage is pretty broad. Do you have comprehensive coverage of everything? No: there are biases built in. Bloggers have done a better job covering tech gadgets than they have homelessness. But within the world of tech gadgets, the coverage that you get from the collective universe of bloggers is so much more intensely deep than anything that any national outlet can provide. Deeper, more reliable, quicker to correct its errors, and faster. That’s kind of an overwhelming thing for a journalist to face.

Rumpus: I want to talk for a moment about another aspect of the passion of bloggers for their work. And this starts with your observation that, although blogs would seem to privilege the present moment, by default modern blogging software creates a meticulous archive and preserves it indefinitely, and bloggers are very careful with their archives, at least in comparison to many media sites.

Rosenberg: That’s hugely important! About a blogger’s relationship to his archive, you know, when I moved my blog from one platform to another a few years ago, I was determined to save every post. It took me hours; I had to go through thousands of posts. And I did it, why? Because I cared! It was my writing.

Rumpus: Yeah, I’ve been through two migrations of my own stuff: LiveJournal to Blogger to WordPress. I did much the same thing.

Rosenberg: Of course you did! It’s your work. You want to preserve it. And yes, it’s such a contrast with what so many print publications have done when they do a platform transition. All sorts of information is just discarded because it’s of no importance to the institution. In general the pros care less than individual bloggers. This point, about blogs having this relationship with the past, is a very interesting point that people don’t always understand.

Rumpus: You write that blogging has a largely-untapped capacity for timelessness.

Rosenberg: Yes. Blogs are so interesting to me because they’re at the fulcrum point of so many different things. For example, it’s at the fulcrum point of the individual and the group; much more so than on a social network, where it’s all about the group. Similarly, a blog is right at the fulcrum point of the present and the past.

Rumpus: You write, in your chapter “When Everyone Has a Blog,” of the very common experience of trying to find some obscure information online — in your case, you were looking for a substitute for some exotic ingredient you can’t find — and sure enough, you found it on some blog with the help of Google. I find it amazing that this depth of information, and this degree of access to it, has come to exist in such a short period of time. In only fifteen years, we have collectively assembled what is, by many measures, the largest single archive of information ever assembled by humanity, and it’s publicly available to anybody who can get access to it. And a great deal of that information is contained in blogs. It staggers the mind.

Rosenberg: It staggers the mind, and it’s surely, to me, something to be celebrated, something to be amazed at, something to be in awe of, and something to delight in. And blogs are an important piece of it. If you were online before the Web, on Usenet and the WELL, and if you knew anything about that world and that culture, when the web came along and you could see how easy it was becoming to contribute to it, it seemed so clear that this was the path it would ultimately take.

For years I had these two voices in my head, one saying, Yes, this is happening and isn’t it great, and what fun! And the other saying, Oh, but you know, that energy will be commodified and turned into something much more banal, and it’s all doomed.

Rumpus: That these creative energies would be co-opted to sell Pepsi.

Rosenberg: Yes. And of course there is commodification on the web. There’s spam and there are SEO-driven splogs. But the interesting thing is that even though we see those things, and we know they’re there, they haven’t ruined the good stuff. They’re not getting that much in the way of the real information, as it turns out. So my personal trajectory, with regard to this, has been to laboriously slough off some of the cynicism that I felt was my birthright as a journalist.

But that’s a tough thing to talk about, because often merely making the case on the positive side for a phenomenon like blogging, even when you balance it with the negative side, you can’t avoid being cast as an idealist and a cheerleader.

Rumpus: To continue on this theme of collective knowledge, at the top of the chapter I mentioned a moment ago, you quote Douglas Adams about the web: “One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.” Would you be willing to expand on the implications of what is happening as media becomes less of a broadcast and more of a global conversation?

Rosenberg: Well, at this point that’s sort of a fait accompli. Blogging, as I describe in the book, in the stories of all these early bloggers and proto-bloggers, was this sort of initial microcosm of something that’s now much larger, that encompasses everything that people do on social networks, and on Twitter, and on YouTube — on the whole panoply of sites that are all about user-contributed content. They have all these different labels, but they all kind of mean the same thing.

And it’s great for what it is, but it’s easy to get into trouble in this discussion, because when you describe this situation, people hear this and they assume you’re saying that therefore we can now discard all of the old forms along with all of the professional dimensions that go along with them.

So the first thing I always try to do is remind people that the examples of dead media are actually very few. For example, theater is still around! It’s not as big as it maybe was in the 19th century, but it has survived movies, it’s survived television, it’s surviving the web. It’s not going away.

Rumpus: Well, in general a given technology doesn’t disappear when a new one comes along and takes over some of its functions. The old one stays around and is put to its best use. That goes for media as well.

Rosenberg: Right. But when the economic foundation for certain kinds of media do disappear, you will have major convulsions during the transition, and that’s not an easy thing to negotiate. We have all of this change to reckon with, and at this point, my guess is that this is so new, each of us is responding to that change in a way determined by our psychological temperaments. You find people who are generally pessimisstic being specifically pessimisstic about this. People who are inclined to be cynical, apply that cynicism to this stuff.

Rumpus: And those who are inclined to be fearful…

Rosenberg: Well, there are things to be fearful of! Look, the business of print journalism has been in overall decline for my entire career, since the early 1980s. That’s a long-term trend that predates the Web. And in fact the Web initially slowed the decline: back in the late 1990s, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were putting out these fat editions full of full-page ads for the latest bubble-driven company. But ever since that bubble burst, the Web has been accelerating this decline in many ways, not because bloggers are cutting in on journalists’ turf, but because the Web has allowed people to offer separately what had been sold by newspapers as an indivisible bundle, classified ads being an obvious example of that. People think they’re reacting to changes in the technology, or the relationship between the writer and the public, or the interactive potential of the web, but what’s really driving these discussions at the deepest level is the underlying economics of the situation. That has changed, and the way forward is not obvious.

Flowchart illustrations by robinhamman; illustration of Scott Rosenberg by Ilyse Magy.

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The Rumpus: Before starting this online magazine I wasn’t that Internet savvy. I was working on a book so I took the browser off my computer so it wouldn’t interrupt my writing. I didn’t have a Facebook account. But now I come across Twitter and I think, this is kind of magical. I’m not sure if this is culturally relevant to the magazine, but I’m interested in it and I’m putting it in anyway.

Biz Stone: Either way. It’s your magazine.

Rumpus: We should start with your history. What leads you here?

Stone: Well, it depends on how far back you want to go. I started as an artist and I had a side job moving some heavy boxes for a publishing company. They had just gotten a Mac for their art department, the department that creates the book covers. And I knew Mac pretty well. I’d used them when I was younger. I was kind of showing the art director a thing or two about how to use a Mac. And one day everyone went out to lunch and I jumped on the computer and designed a book jacket and slipped it in the pile to go to the review board in New York. They picked my jacket and when the art director got back to Boston, he wanted to know who designed it and I said, “Me.” He was like, “The box guy?”

Rumpus: So you got work?

Stone: I did. I started designing book jackets, which was great because I was good at it. And then from there I decided to become a freelance graphic designer and I needed to expand beyond book jackets, so I taught myself web design, and then in 1999 some friends of mine decided to start a company called Xanga.com, which was a very early kind of social network slash blogging community. We launched it in 2000, and they’re still based in New York. They’re still doing their thing. They are just a small private, profitable company, that never really went really big, big, big, Internet.

Rumpus: But clearly people are into it. People are still using it and not changing it.

Stone: They’ve changed the way they run the company, but they’re still there. But anyway that’s how I made the jump. I was the Creative Director and product guy over at Xanga and then after Xanga—

Rumpus: Wait, you started this business, Xanga, and that’s kind of this pivotal thing. You go from this art guy to what?

Stone: What happened was my best friend Mark. He went to college, but I’d dropped out of college to start this design thing, and he graduated college with his friend, John. It was them who said, “Hey, we’re thinking of leaving our jobs.” They we’re thinking of leaving these consulting jobs and starting a “web company.” They knew I knew web design, and that was how we jumped in and started shaping what this may or may not be. It changed a lot. We originally thought Xanga would be an online reviews kind of thing.

Rumpus: Online reviews?

Stone: Like if you have CDs why not just write about them, or movies, or whatever. But we quickly turned that into write about anything and read what your friends are writing, do it all in one place. And that’s what really helped it take off because it was that social feedback.

Rumpus: Didn’t livejournal already exist at this point?

Stone: It was about the same time, I think. We were building Xanga in 1999, and we launched in 2000, and I think livejournal probably did exist. I wasn’t aware of it until I started doing Xanga and realized there was a service out there like this, but that was only like, “Oh, then this must be a thing.” And it was interesting. That’s how I first started getting into the web. That’s how, or why, in 2003, when Google acquired Blogger, they asked me to come work with them, specifically on the Blogger team.

Rumpus: What were you doing right at that moment that you were leaving to go to Blogger?

Stone: I had already left Xanga. I had actually moved back to Boston. I was working at Wellesley College. I was writing and developing software for alumnae to be able to connect and communicate. So I moved out here in 2003 to work on Blogger. I thought I was going to stay at Google, because it was a great place to work. Evan, who I became very good friends with at Google, my co-founder here at Twitter, left and I decided to follow him. We worked together on a start-up called Odeo, an online audio podcasting service. At Odeo, Twitter was a sort of side project that ended up taking off.

Rumpus: What happened with Odeo?

Stone: We realized we weren’t really using Odeo, we weren’t investing our own time creating podcasts. We were building a tool that was a great idea for some other people. That’s a dangerous way to go because if you don’t actually use it yourself and love it, then you aren’t going to be as fully invested in it from the start. That’s what leads you to doing side projects.

Rumpus: And?

Stone: And we sold Odeo to people who wanted to work on it. It exists today. Now it has video and audio and it’s a whole directory.

Rumpus: But you kept the Twitter part?

Stone: We actually created Twitter and Odeo at the same time. When we realized we didn’t really want to be running Odeo anymore we looked around for anyone who wanted to buy Odeo, but not acquire us as a technology. But people aren’t as interested in that. So we founded a new company and that company acquired Odeo and its assets. Now we were free to do whatever we wanted. We sold Odeo to a New York-based company which the state runs and it’s great. We did Twitter, and Twitter grew so fast, and in 2006 we spun it out into Twitter, Inc.

Rumpus: An American story. So Odeo doesn’t own Twitter?

Stone: No.

Rumpus: I just met with M. and she twittered that I was coming to meet you.

Stone: Oh, yeah, that’s awesome.

Rumpus: I mean, it’s funny right?

Stone: Yeah.

Rumpus: We’re talking about this technology, and here’s M. on your technology twittering about it. I dunno… it seems so meta.

Stone: It’s funny that you say “your technology” because I don’t really think about it like that. There’s a lot of social input when you put these things out there. People’s ideas cross with other people’s thoughts.

Rumpus: You don’t think of this as your technology? You think of it as everybody’s technology?

Stone: I think of Twitter as a messaging system that you didn’t know you needed until you had it. Think about when cell phones first started coming out. People said, “Why would I carry my phone around?” And now you’ll drive back to your house thirty miles if you forget your cell phone.

Rumpus: That’s a broad definition of Twitter.

Stone: Yeah, it’s broad. You can kind of zoom out and look at it as social networking. I don’t think of Twitter as a social network. I think of it as a messaging system that has a lot of social components to it.

Rumpus: What’s the difference between a social network and a social networking system?

Stone: When you think of a social network, you have these two-way interactions: “Are you my friend? Yes? No? Yes?” Like LinkedIn, it’s business oriented, but it’s all about establishing connections. You connect to me through my other connections, and that sort of thing, and you sort of define who your friends are. Twitter doesn’t have that.

Rumpus: Explain.

Stone: Okay. So there are a lot of sources of information out there, so why don’t you curate for yourself a list, like a real timeline of information, like the New York Times, or JetBlue, or your friends, or this comedian, or this guy who pretends to be a cat, or whatever it is, whatever entertains you, whatever you find useful. You curate information that you want to receive. It’s a lot different because I’m not asking you if it’s okay, I’m just saying I’m following your updates. That’s why I don’t think of Twitter as a social network.

Rumpus: What has Twitter brought to the table, then?

Stone: I think Twitter has brought something totally new to the table. First of all, real time. We didn’t have anything before Twitter that allowed a group of people roaming around a city to communicate instantly, in real time, and in a coordinated way, in a group. I’ve probably overused this analogy of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight, but, in reality, it’s so simple, real time communication of individuals that allow for this super organism type of organism to happen. And I think before Twitter people didn’t think that way, not in any sort of meaningful or specific way, so what I’m trying to say, if we’re trying a bunch of stuff, a lot of cool and great social stuff, a lot of platform stuff, then some of it will stick, and some of it will be junked over. Some of it will be just like the cell phone, you can’t imagine not having it.

Rumpus: We were at SXSW a couple weeks ago and Twitter was so handy. I was seeing everyone is here, I can go here, I can meet this person here. But if I want to go out with ten specific people, I really don’t want everyone to see that. Are you going to have friend groups or something like that?

Stone: I wasn’t at SXSW, but it’s at events like that where it really clicks for you, where it’s something Twitter can be, and it also shows you that you know, you also want a tool that allows you to become hyper-connected, but that also allows you to pull back. When you think about email or IMing, why aren’t you writing back? I can see your avatar, I know you’re online, why aren’t you writing me back? But with Twitter, everybody sends their responses to Twitter, and Twitter then sends them out to everyone. So there’s not this constant connection. You can be hyperconnected, then you can take a break for a couple days and it’s fine.

Rumpus: But—

Stone: Right, right, getting back to your question, I think that it just speaks to the issue of feature design, how can we make the product better, what can we do to make it more valuable to people? And I think groups or lists of some kind, so that you could instantly say I want to follow all these people because I’m at this thing, and now I don’t want to follow them anymore, and just make that easier to do, I think, yeah, there’s a lot of things you can do there. Now on the input end, you have to be really careful because you’re using this beautiful, cognitive, low, thing that you just send off, and that’s what makes it so useful, and what’s so great during an emergency or during a casual situation or whatever it is. You have to think for an email. What’s the subject? What’s it about? It takes two seconds to think about that. So you have to think, Is this a work thing or a social thing? Which? Then you get into a situation that you don’t want to be in, because then people are thinking about it too much.

Rumpus: When I did work in tech ten years ago, I did it in search and I think the reason Google took over is because it became just search. And you go to Yahoo and it’s too much. And that’s the analogy I feel like between Facebook and Twitter. I mean obviously, they are different in a lot of ways, but Facebook, to me, feels like Yahoo used to feel, and Twitter feels like Google. I just go and I do this one thing. And it’s very simple.

Stone: I think a lot of that is sort of how you design the product. I think we definitely want to focus on the simplicity aspect because it’s something that’s built into the culture even here at Twitter. Constraints inspire creativity.

Rumpus: 140 characters.

Stone: Yes, I mean, even when it’s really simple, there’s so much amazing beautiful creativity that can come out of that. You know, I mean just look at haiku, the idea of it. We want to focus on that singularity, on that simplicity, but we still want to add features and add value, but we want to do it in a way that fits in with that mentality of simplicity. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Rumpus: Because there are so many things that you want to do.

Stone: Yes.

Rumpus: I’m curious about writing in the age of online publishing. Because nobody cares about good writing online. Or maybe we are so early in the online magazine revolution that writing isn’t important. It’s more about the information.

Stone: But I don’t think that’s true. When you think about Twitter, there are people all around the world reporting twenty-four seven, every second. They’re reporting what they’re seeing and what’s happening around them. So there’s a lot of potential for breaking news. We can break news really fast. When an earthquake happens, there are people Twittering about it. When a plane lands in the Hudson and there’s a Twitter user on the ferry taking a picture of it, Boom. That’s it. The water is still splashing. Here’s the photo of the thing. But then we need people to put this all in context and tell the story. What happened behind it? A Twitter update is simple and fast and gets the information and news, and it spreads it very quickly, and it can contain links so you can then link to this whole context of information. And I think that’s a really important role that people sometimes forget about, especially with all these newspaper shutting down and having trouble, where are all these stories going to go? I think you have something really great with all those stories waiting to be told, but I just don’t know how it shapes up exactly. I don’t think there are going to be a lot of newspaper reporters sitting around not writing, you know?

Rumpus: But where is it going to go?

Stone: The good news is, since the old models aren’t working… I mean, it’s just the idea.

Rumpus: What do you mean?

Stone: Hey, I got an idea: people like news why don’t we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we’ll gas them up and drive them to everyone’s house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn’t sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news. What if the New York Times gave out free, cheap Kindles to everyone and said this is how we’re doing it now. You know? Maybe that’s a way to go. The technology gets cheaper and cheaper, and at some point it has to be cheaper than all these trucks and all this gas, to just say, let’s give away a Kindle to everyone.

Rumpus: But what about the role of the editor? The barrier entry is so low online. It’s nonexistent. Anything gets published.

Stone: But that’s what I’m saying, we need that editor and those reporters are the people who are the storytellers and the context-providers. Twitter provides a great amount of timely information, but we still need those people to fill out the rest of the story and the context.

Rumpus: Do you have an offline life?

Stone: I see this technology kind of falling away to the point where you have access to it but you don’t really see it or notice it. It’s ambient. You don’t have to spend the entire day hunched over your computer consuming this information. Maybe, it is as simple as once in a while glancing down at the device that’s invaluable to you or many reasons, catching up, or it lets you know when you should know something. But as these things get better and we get more connected in it, it will get more sophisticated.

Rumpus: Online and offline?

Stone: Right. What I’d like to see happen is some of this stuff disappear. You know, I still walk around the streets, and I see these giant wooden poles with bits of wire and stuff and huge trash can sized devices attached, and they’ve been there for a hundred years, you know? We still have these things? What are these things? And I think, you know, maybe that will be what it’s like, years from now. Are you carrying this thing around with you? This giant device? So, hopefully it melts away, even though we are even more sophisticated and connected in terms of how we can communicate, as we become smarter, more efficient, more open, more information is a lot more democratized, but the context is there when we need it. That sort of thing. I don’t know about the answer, but that sounds kind of like it. Doesn’t it?

Rumpus: So you can, like, get out in the world to connect?

Stone: Yeah! I mean, it’s already happening a little bit. My wife’s job is as a wildlife rehabilitator, so people bring in wounded birds. Actually, just the other day, the author of The English Patient dropped off an injured cedar wax to her. She rehabilitates these wild animals, and then re-releases them. I sometimes go with her to help her drive or just take her to where she needs to go to drop off. And there was one thing one time a while ago, when we were having a technical difficulty on Twitter on a Sunday evening, but we had to go drop off an opossum in someone’s woods in Oakland. And I was on my iPhone setting a status message explaining why, about the downtime, while she was driving. It was funny to me because I am doing this very sort of technical thing and communicating with my Ops and Engineer team while we’re dropping off a wild opossum to go back in the wild and live in the woods. So, I think, that kind of stuff. But even more slowed down and less hectic, a more natural blending.

Rumpus: Because people in technology, maybe especially in the 30-45 range, or the 30-50 range, are confused about where technology intersects with our lives, and we’re stressed about it.

Stone: Oh, there’s a huge overlap. I mean, people are watching TV, they’re watching some clips on their iPhone. I mean, some folks are sitting there on the iPhone, watching the Colbert Report, and meanwhile there’s a huge plasma TV right in front of them that they could be watching it on.

Rumpus: Yeah, I know.

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