Smart Mobs Read online

  Author photograph © Justin Hall

  Howard Rheingold is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the social implications of technology. Over the past twenty years he has traveled around the world, observing and writing about emerging trends in computing, communications, and culture. One of the creators and former founding executive editor of HotWired, he has served as editor of The Whole Catalog, Earth Review, editor-in-chief of The Millennium Whole Earth and on-line host for The Well. The author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Virtual Reality, and Tools for Thought, he lives in Mill Valley, California. Visit his web site at www.smartmobs.com.

  PRAISE FOR SMART MOBS

  “[Rheingold’s] notion of smart mobs is a provocative distillation, a sort of unified field theory of current tech thinking.”

  Business Week

  “Rheingold has for a generation examined the unintended and imaginative uses of new technology by society. He helped pioneer virtual communities—a phrase he invented—before most people had even heard of e-mail or seen a cell phone.”

  Washington Post

  “Mr. Rheingold can recognize a revolution. He published The Virtual Community in 1993, long before corporate America realized that the killer app of the Internet would be the connections that the Net allows between people. He sees a similar shift with smart mobs and what he calls swarming.”

  New York Times

  “[Rheingold is] exploring intriguing new questions.”

  New Scientist

  “[Rheingold] draws on a bewildering range of disciplines to examine what life in such a world might be like….much food for thought for people who want to be informed about what’s about to engulf them.”

  San Francisco Chronicle

  “This is an extraordinarily important book, rich in implications for everyone from teens and CEOs, to parents and Pentagon generals.”

  Paul Saffo, Director, Institute for the Future

  “To track where technology bends society, I’ve learned to follow Howard Rheingold. He always leads a grand tour, and this time is no different. In this book, he takes you to the edge of the global brain as made real by thumb tribes and mobile networks. You don’t want to leave.”

  Kevin Kelly, Editor-at-Large, Wired

  “From techno-animism and hyper-coordination, to smartifacts and social networks, this insightful and engaging guided tour through the next communications renaissance is at turns inspiring, frightening, but always fascinating. Smart Mobs is Rheingold’s greatest achievement.”

  Douglas Rushkoff, author of

  Coercion, Media Virus, and Nothing Sacred,

  Professor, New York University’s

  Interactive Telecommunications Program

  “Howard Rheingold has always been about ten years ahead of the rest of us, but Smart Mobs may be his most visionary book yet. Anyone interested in the future of technology and society will find this book fascinating reading.”

  Steven Johnson, author of Emergence and Interface Culture

  “Smart Mobs is hot on the trail of a technology that is hot-wiring social networks around the world, with unexpected and fascinating implications for all of us.”

  David Weinberger, author of

  Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of

  The Cluetrain Manifesto

  “I congratulate Howard Rheingold on his very thorough summary of one of the greatest transformations of human society—perhaps even more profound than the development of writing.”

  Sir Arthur C. Clarke

  SMART MOBS

  The Next Social Revolution

  HOWARD RHEINGOLD

  To Hannah Geraldine Rheingold, my mother and teacher, who gave me permission to color outside the lines: Thank you, Mom.

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and where Perseus Publishing was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters.

  Copyright © 2002 by Howard Rheingold

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN-10 0-7382-0608-3 (hc.)

  ISBN-13 978-0-7382-0608-0 (hc.)

  ISBN-10 0-7382-0861-2 (pbk.)

  ISBN-13 978-0-7382-0861-9 (pbk.)

  eBook ISBN: 9780465004393

  Basic Books is a member of the Perseus Books Group.

  Find us on the World Wide Web at http://www.basicbooks.com

  Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, or call (800) 255-1514 or (617) 252-5298, or e-mail [email protected].

  Text design by Brent Wilcox

  Set in 10.5-point New Caledonia by the Perseus Books Group

  EBA 06 07 08 09 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6

  ALSO BY HOWARD RHEINGOLD

  The Virtual Community

  Tools for Thought

  They Have a Word for It

  Virtual Reality

  Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (coauthor)

  Higher Creativity (coauthor)

  Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind

  The Cognitive Connection (coauthor)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TO THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE: THANK YOU! I COULD NEVER HAVE DONE this without you.

  Marc A. Smith convinced me that I could weave a book from our many-stranded conversations about cooperation, communication, and computation and then stuck with me to inspire, provoke, support, and educate over the two years it took to do it.

  Kevin Kelly, who has patiently pushed, persuaded, edited, and criticized my work for more than a decade, suggested that I turn one of the chapter titles into the name of this book.

  My agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson, who never settle for less, rejected my first two attempts at a book proposal and then found me an editor who understood what I was trying to do.

  Nick Philipson at Perseus Books has been this book’s champion from the beginning. This was our first book together; I hope it won’t be our last.

  Moya Mason, researcher extraordinaire, has been intelligent, incisive, meticulous, creative, perfectionistic, and confident. This is our second book together; I hope it won’t be our last.

  Michele Armstrong transcribed many hours of interviews, not all of which were conducted under ideal conditions.

  Jennifer Swearingen is an author’s dream—the best copy editor I have encountered.

  Bryan Alexander, Timothy Burke, Charles Cameron, Peter Feltham, Gary Jones, Jim Lai, and Michael Wilson were the smartest, best-read, most candid online brain trust I could have hoped for.

  Joanna Lemola and Alex Nieminen in Helsinki; Mimi Ito, Joi Ito, and Justin Hall in Tokyo; Judith Donath in Cambridge; and Michael Thomsen in Stockholm were invaluable guides to emerging cultures in their parts of the world. Tim Pozar and Robert Heverly tutored me in the complexities of wireless technology and regulation. Lawrence Lessig alerted me to the attempt to enclose the Internet’s innovation commons. David Reed showed me the key connections between social networks, communication networks, and the cornucopia of the commons they make possible.

  The people of the Brainstorms community, in both physical and virtual worlds, helped me retain a small residue of sanity and humor during the month
s I lived in my office.

  Rebecca Marks shepherded the book’s final production with skill and patience. Lissa Warren, publicist, has been a joy to work with.

  Judy and Mamie Rheingold: Without you, what’s the point?

  INTRODUCTION:

  How to Recognize the Future When It Lands on You

  THE FIRST SIGNS OF THE NEXT SHIFT BEGAN TO REVEAL THEM SELVES 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,” as it has come to be called, 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 the Internet auction site eBay is part of it. At least one key global business question is part of it: Why is the Japanese company Do-CoMo profiting from enhanced wireless Internet services while U.S. 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 smart 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 are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, and neighborhoods; products, including everything from box tops to shoes, are embedded 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.

  Within a decade, the major population centers of the planet will be saturated with trillions of microchips, some of them tiny computers, many of them capable of communicating with each other. Some of these devices will be telephones, and they will also be supercomputers with the processing power that only the Department of Defense could muster a couple of decades ago. Some devices will read barcodes and send and receive messages to radio-frequency identity tags. Some will furnish wireless, always-on Internet connections and will contain global positioning devices. As a result, large numbers of people in industrial nations will have a device with them most of the time that will enable them to link objects, places, and people to online content and processes. Point your device at a street sign, announce where you want to go, and follow the animated map beamed to the box in your palm, or point at a book in a store and see what the Times and your neighborhood reading group have to say about it. Click on a restaurant and warn your friends that the service has deteriorated.

  These devices will help people coordinate actions with others around the world—and, perhaps more importantly, with people nearby. Groups of people using these tools will gain new forms of social power, new ways to organize their interactions and exchanges just in time and just in place. Tomorrow’s fortunes will be made by the businesses that find a way to profit from these changes, and yesterday’s fortunes are already being lost by businesses that don’t understand them. As with the personal computer and the Internet, key breakthroughs won’t come from established industry leaders but from the fringes, from skunkworks and startups and even associations of amateurs. Especially associations of amateurs.

  Although it will take a decade to ramp up, mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell, govern, and create. Some of these changes are beneficial and empowering, and some amplify the capabilities of people whose intentions are malignant. Large numbers of small groups, using the new media to their individual benefit, will create emergent effects that will nourish some existing institutions and ways of life and dissolve others. Contradictory and simultaneous effects are likely: People might gain new powers at the same time we lose old freedoms. New public goods could become possible, and older public goods might disappear.

  When I started looking into mobile telephone use in Tokyo, I discovered that Shibuya Crossing was the most mobile-phone-dense neighborhood in the world: 80 percent of the 1,500 people who traverse that madcap plaza at each light change carry a mobile phone.1 I took that coincidence as evidence that I was on the right track, although I had only an inkling of how to define what I was tracking. It had not yet become clear to me that I was no longer looking for intriguing evidence about changing techno-social practices, but galloping off on a worldwide hunt for the shape of the future.

  I learned that those teenagers and others in Japan who were staring at their mobile phones and twiddling the keyboards with their thumbs were sending words and simple graphics to each other—messages like short emails that were delivered instantly but could be read at any time. When I looked into the technical underpinnings of telephone texting, I found that those early texters were walking around with an always-on connection to the Internet in their hands. The tingling in my forebrain turned into a buzz. When you have a persistent connection to the Internet, you have access to a great deal more than a communication channel.

  A puzzling problem troubles those who understand the possibilities inherent in a mobile Internet: The potential power of connecting mobile devices to the Internet has been foreseen and hyped recently, but with the exception of DoCoMo, no company has yet created significant profits from wireless Internet services. The dotcom market collapse of 2001, accompanied by the even larger decline in value of global telecommunication companies, raised the question of whether any existing enterprises will have both the capital and the savvy to plug the Internet world into mobile telephony and make a successful business out of it.

  Forecasting the technical potential of wireless Internet is the easy part. I knew that I should expect the unexpected when previously separate technologies meet. In the 1980s, television-like display screens plus miniaturized computers added up to a new technology with properties of its own: personal computers. PCs evolved dramatically over twenty years; today’s handheld computer is thousands of times more powerful than the first Apple PC. Then PCs mated with telecommunications networks and multiplied in the 1990s to create the Internet, again spawning possibilities that neither of the parent technologies exhibited in isolation. Again, the new hybrid medium started evolving rapidly; my Internet connection today is thousands of times faster than my modem of the early 1980s. Then the Web in the late 1990s put a visual co
ntrol panel on the Net and opened it to hundreds of millions of mainstream users. What’s next in this self-accelerating spiral of technological, economic, and social change?

  Next comes the mobile Net. Between 2000 and 2010, the social networking of mobile communications will join with the information-processing power of networked PCs. Critical mass will emerge some time after 2003, when more mobile devices than PCs will be connected to the Internet.2 If the transition period we are entering in the first decade of the twenty-first century resembles the advent of PCs and the Internet, the new technology regime will turn out to be an entirely new medium, not simply a means of receiving stock quotes or email on the train or surfing the Web while walking down the street. Mobile Internet, when it really arrives, will not be just a way to do old things while moving. It will be a way to do things that couldn’t be done before.

  Anybody who remembers what mobile telephones looked like five years ago has a sense of the pace at which handheld technology is evolving. Today’s mobile devices are not only smaller and lighter than the earliest cell phones, they have become tiny multimedia Internet terminals. I returned to Tokyo a year and a half after I first noticed people using telephones to send text between tiny black and white screens. On my most recent visit in the fall of 2001, I conducted my own color videoconference conversations via the current version of high-speed, multimedia, “third-generation” mobile phones. Perhaps even more important than the evolution of color and video screens in telephone displays is the presence of “location awareness” in mobile telephones. Increasingly, handheld devices can detect, within a few yards, where they are located on a continent, within a neighborhood, or inside a room.

  These separate upgrades in capabilities don’t just add to each other; mobile, multimedia, location-sensitive characteristics multiply each other’s usefulness. At the same time, their costs drop dramatically. As we will see in later chapters, the driving factors of the mobile, context-sensitive, Internet-connected devices are Moore’s Law (computer chips gets cheaper as they grow more powerful), Metcalfe’s Law (the useful power of a network multiplies rapidly as the number of nodes in the network increases), and Reed’s Law (the power of a network, especially one that enhances social networks, multiplies even more rapidly as the number of different human groups that can use the network increases). Moore’s Law drove the PC industry and the cultural changes that resulted, Metcalfe’s Law drove the deployment of the Internet, and Reed’s Law will drive the growth of the mobile and pervasive Net.