Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it — to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.
...we should pause to recognize that the disruption of media by technology is nothing new. It goes back at least 500 years to when Gutenberg’s movable-type printing presses wrested control over the flow of information from the scriveners and scribes that worked for the church and other authorities. This permitted people to have direct access to information, and thus helped enable both the Reformation and the Renaissance.
So amid technological change, we should remember what a good technology paper is. It’s superb at the storage and distribution and retrieval of information. It’s got an incredible battery life, and it doesn’t have to have backwards compatible operating systems.
But for all of its wonders, I think that the birth of the Internet was accompanied by two original sins. First, we allowed and even indulged anonymity. I know that anonymity protects people’s privacy and allows them to say what they want. But the Internet could have been built differently, and at some point maybe it will be, so that users would have a choice. You should be able to go to the part of the Internet that’s anonymous. But you should also have the option to go to a secure layer of the network that has verified identity and authentication. That would allow you to engage in discussions and read the comments of people who are willing to take responsibility for what they say. It would make for more civil discussions. It would also permit more secure banking, easy financial transactions, fewer cyberattacks, less spam and phishing, and reduce the number of times you get emails from friends say they’ve lost their wallet in Malaysia so could you please wire them some money via a bank in Nigeria. In the real world we spend most of our time in places where we know who we are talking to and dealing with; we should have that same option on the Internet.
There’s a tale that Plato tells in The Republic involving the Ring of Gyges. If you put on the ring, nobody knows what you’ve done, nobody knows what you said, nobody knows it was you who did something. He and Socrates discuss whether you could have a civil system and morality if people could put on the Ring of Gyges. Today’s Internet shows us that the answer is no.
I think we need to offer communities that are less anonymous and more curated. Obviously there should be places that indulge anonymity, and if people want to go there, fine. But we should also create places where people can be part of communities that aren’t susceptible to trolling and anonymity – places where people take responsibility for their own words.
When I was meeting with Steve Jobs and we were trying to get the emails he had sent in the 1990s, they were impossible to retrieve, even by his tech people. When I asked a university librarian recently the best way to preserve some interesting e-mails I had, she said I should print them out on paper and put them in a box.
When the Internet was devised fifty years ago, its underlying technology, known as packet switching, tended to decentralize the control of information flows. Instead of central hubs that authorities could control, each node of the Internet had the power to originate, forward, and receive information. If censors or an enemy was able to restrict some of the nodes, the network would just route around them.
Networks transform everything they touch.
It became clear to me that the lack of control of information was always going to lead to the demise of authoritarian regimes.
Journalism isn’t broken. What’s broken is the business model for journalism.
Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it — to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.