Jaron Lanier — artist, scientist, visionary, and coiner of the term “virtual reality” — spoke by cell phone with J.D. Lasica from a café in Tribeca, New York, on Oct. 4, 2002, in advance of the PopTech conference in Camden, Maine.

The PopTech program teases us with your presentation by saying only, A Musical Experience With Virtual Reality. What should we expect?

Oh, my, that’s news to me. There is a thing I do sometimes which involves using some of the equipment from virtual reality research and stage performance, and I try to make virtual worlds that are themselves musical instruments in some way or have instruments in them. It’s fun, and it works on stage, but I’m struggling with this question of how to make creative tools for invention inside virtual worlds, and these instruments are, for me, the most familiar and appropriate metaphor to start with. However, I was not planning to do it in Maine, the reason being that it’s kind of a big production, and it’s expensive and involves a lot of equipment, and I had been thinking of this as a much simpler affair.

Some of the PopTech people saw me play my music at the World Economic Forum, the Davos meeting that was held in New York this year, where I played a duet with a wonderful percussionist named Will Calhoun. We’re trying to perform music that takes some of the elements of jazz, with extended instrumental improvisation, and combining that with some elements of electronic club music, but trying to get away from that genre’s repetitiveness. But let me say that that has nothing to do with virtual reality. I’d like to give a talk as well as perform, so maybe you could pass that request along.

I’ll do that. I know you’ve dabbled in Asian instruments as well. What other musical approaches have you tackled lately?

Unfortunately, to be a successful entertainer, you have to reduce the number of things you do so you can be described quickly and fit into people’s brains quickly so people know who you are. I have not made a decision to be an entertainer, I’m doing the artist thing more. I’ll have fewer people interested in me, and they’ll have to do more work to understand me. I play piano concerts, I do orchestral music, opera, soundtracks, really a wide variety.

I read in a postscript you added to an interview conducted just before the Sept. 11 attacks that you’re now more willing to live with surveillance. How have your attitudes about transparency, privacy or civil liberties changed as a result of Sept. 11?

My feeling is that it’s possible to have varying levels of transparency in society, and what makes a society both democratic and desirable is not so much the degree of transparency but the degree to which it’s symmetrical and similar for everyone. So if there’s a world in which my personal details are more available to people and I have less privacy, I’m willing to accept that if the same standard applies to corporations and the government and celebrities and whoever else is in a protected status right now. We have three elites who are entitled to more privacy than you or I, certain Hollywood type people, certain aspects of government and of corporations. I’m ready to give up privacy if they are. I’m ready to do it in tandem with them.

How have you spent most of your time this year in your role as lead scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative working on Internet 2?

This year I’ve been working on thenotropics. I describe it in a chapter in a new book called The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century. It’s a way of rethinking how we connect the idea of information to the physical world. The first generation of information scientists — people like Claude Shannon — used the metaphors that were available to them, which were all based on sending information on wires and the protocols that let you look at only one (pulse) at a time on a charged wire. … But if you contrast that to the way a human eye connects to world, where a bunch of points are stimulated at once, the eye, even in one instant, can see a whole pattern and can interpret a still image. There’s a real threshold of difference to being more oriented to pre-agreed formats of information, which is the protocol, vs. interpreting a signal even if it’s not with agreement on the format, and that would be called pattern recognition. Computer science as we know it is based on the extreme protocol side of the spectrum.

There are a couple of ways in which this could be highly significant. One is that right now we don’t have a way of writing giant programs. Humanity’s techniques for making software run out at a certain size. That’s a big problem, because there’s a lot of software that we should have that we don’t know how to have. But we have a lot of other problems as well: with software reliability, with being able to read old data that becomes illegible. The way software is today is not acceptable. And so this is an attempt to make a new kind of software that will behave in certain ways.

For the uninitiated, what is Internet2, and when is it expected to arrive?

Internet2 is a specific project of a coalition of more than 180 universities to build advanced network applications. There’s a physical network and infrastructure called Abilene, and there’s a whole lot of research in specific areas, such as quality of service and things like tele-immersion, which couldn’t be done on any other version of the network before. But Internet2 is not a particular technology or platform, it’s more of a distributed laboratory.

Are you familiar with the conflict between the entertainment and high-tech industries that may result in restrictions in the way people can use computers, the Internet, television and so on in the name of protecting intellectual property? Where do you come down?

I’ve thought about it a very great deal. I’ve put out records on major labels myself, so I’ve experienced it from both sides. It’s a torturous issue. If I have to choose between the positions of the record industry and Howard Rheingold, I would choose Howard. But what I would prefer to find is a middle path, a compromise. The truth is that finding that compromise is extremely difficult. By luck or fate, it’s just very, very hard to come up with a technological design that can support an in-between position on this, and it’s very easy to come up with a technological design that supports an extreme position in either one direction or the other. Today’s situation is not working for anyone. Everyone’s unhappy.

I have some ideas on what an in-between design would look like, but it would take an hour or so to describe it.

The entertainment business has problems. You have to say it’s an extremely corrupt, essentially criminal business sector. I mean that in a literal sense. Everyone knows and acknowledges that payola, which is supposed to be illegal, is universally practiced by the music industry for promotion now. So we have an industry in which criminal behavior is openly accepted and standard. There has to be fundamental reform of the media industry to bring it into some sort of non-criminal mode of action. Otherwise we’re going to wind up with a sort of totalitarian media regime where you just have a very small number of people who control the means of communication, and that will lead to catastrophe. You can’t have democracy under that kind of system, you can’t have art.

If we’re going to go in the direction of intellectual property rights as the principal legal concern, it simply must be coupled with a wholesale assault on the corruption that’s crucial to business practices in the entertainment industry. And that isn’t happening.

In an interview in 1997, you told me you believe the Internet is not simply another medium, like movies or television — it’s the future of all communication that’s not face to face. Do you still hold that view?

Well, sure. The future is ours to make. We can build whatever future we want.

That’s an optimistic view in light of what’s happening in Washington, where there are movements afoot to restrict the kinds of media you can receive over the Internet.

All that stuff is profoundly mistaken. The level to which it’s mistaken is sort of breathtaking. What’s going on is the government is acting as the whore for hire of the media and consumer electronics side of the aisle. So we have the law telling us that we’re going to have digital HDTV, the law telling us which streams of information can go where, we have the law telling us what information we can distribute to each other. Because of the high degree of corruption and criminality in the entertainment industry, it’s all for the protection and service of a tiny, tiny, tiny elite. It doesn’t protect small-time players at all. It’s infuriating, it’s revolting. This tiny elite makes us all stupider with the inferior quality of their products. It dumbs everything down.

The Hollywood elite is subject to the same law of unintended consequences that everyone is. If there’s a law that says, in the future we’ll only be allowed digital TV sets and TV can only go across end-to-end controlled channels to these digital TV sets, the question is, what will motivate people to buy these?

From a global perspective, isn’t it beyond the reach of the US government to control or hobble the Net?

It’s a mixture. For instance, China is a place of authoritarian capitalism. China is the wet dream of Hollywood. In China you have a central political police authority that’s willing to control the Net and shut down open things. But the whole society is structured that way, so it works. Of course, we all want China to become a more open, tolerant place. But at the same time, the particular strength of the United States has always depended on a kind of openness that the Chinese have not depended on. So you have different parts of the world trying to control Net access in different ways.

The post Jaron Lanier discusses virtual reality & music appeared first on JD Lasica.

The author of ‘Avatars’ talks about cyber cocktail parties and the concept of shared virtual worlds

Bruce Damer, a pioneer in the field of virtual worlds and author of “Avatars,” spoke with me by phone in advance of the PopTech conference in Camden, Maine.

Have you been to PopTech before?

This will be our first trip. My life partner, Galen Brandt, will be coming, too. I’ve heard so much about it.

What have they asked you to talk about?

I was brought into PopTech by Ray Kurzwell as our organizations (the Contact Consortium and DigitalSpace) have been doing virtual worlds stuff for seven years now. I even wrote a book on the subject. I have to say I’m a little skeptical of the notion that some day AI’s will replace us and we’ll fall in love with them or upload our consciousness. I agree with Jaron Lanier that in fact we are as a species pretty bad at writing code and that in 25 years we will still be buried under the weight of legacy systems. I have a whole barn full of computers on our property here in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California that bears living testament that progress in software is painfully slow. I wrote a lot of code for 15 years giving me a healthy respect for the gap between expectations and reality in technology. In response to last year’s debate among folks like Bill Joy, Jaron, Ray and others, I wrote a piece for Ray’s site that pretty much spells our my views on this.

In the ’80s I wrote a GUI-based environment for Xerox, but got very tired of the metaphor of windows and pages, links, lists and trash bins. In fact, our museum is crammed full of working systems from the ’70s and ’80s that exhibited the beginnings of the user interface.

What’s the museum and its message?

The DigiBarn Computer Museum just opened in July. It’s about 5,000 square feet of weird old computers, from Xerox Star to game systems to the Cray 1 supercomputer. It represents the Cambrian explosion of innovation that occurred from 1975 to 1990. It’s also about the realization that we may be coming into a period of less innovation, which I think we are. And it looks at the speculators from the investment community who came in during the ’90s and wrecked the industry. And now with software patents and large monopoly players, where are we gonna go from here, folks? You can’t so easily go out, form a company, and design and build something that’s kooky and innovative today.

Are you bringing any of your avatar toys to PopTech?

We have gathered together a bunch of technology that was generated in the first wave of the concept of a shared virtual world. One such system, called Traveler, works so that when you talk, your avatar representation lip-syncs with you. The company that created this tremendous environment was going into Chapter 7, so we picked up its assets two years ago, and now it’s growing virally. People are hosting their own world and utilizing it around the clock. Traveler teaches you what an avatar is: You see a window on your screen and giant floating heads and one of these giant heads turns to you and talks, and you talk back. An avatar is therefore your personification, your visual agency in cyberspace. I hope to give a tour of several other avatar and biologically inspired worlds for the audience. The entire medium is pretty well documented at the Contact Consortium site.

Do people use this for games, or chat, or other applications?

For the user, Traveler is a cocktail party, a huge social scene. They play instruments through their avatar heads, they dance. It’s amazing. In some virtual worlds, you’ve got people who like to talk, or build, or make social organizations happen, or who are simply flirting, or who are shy and become less shy in these worlds.

A lot of people over 30 scratch their heads and say, Why? People over 40, like me, scratch their heads and say, Not another bloody thing to learn! Let me out of here. I don’t want to learn how to navigate 5,000 acres of virtual space. But in a sense, these worlds are the frontier in the interaction between humans and technology. A lot of kids can build worlds together with whole social organizations. They can do that in cyberspace but can’t do that at school because they’re stuck in a bloody 19th century classroom setting. These kids are using virtual worlds to learn how to live in the 21st century. There are many stories to tell here.

So you’ve run into kids who are into these kinds of virtual worlds?

Plenty. We’re working with a large number of teachers now on the Adobe Atmosphere project, and the teachers tell us that in some instances up to a third of their class are into a multi-user online space, and they come to school and that’s what they’re talking about. Like, what happened last night in XX world. But it can also come into play in the classroom: the Adobe Atmosphere platform lets them build their own spaces.

Will your virtual worlds presentation at PopTech be hands on?

We’ll try to get a conference world built and then jointly talk to the audience about it, even setting up a public workstation if the conference will permit it. I hope we get a reasonable amount of screen time to show the group what it is we’re talking about.

Tell me about your new Intercommons initiative.

Virtual worlds are an example of a refreshing innovation in high technology. Many of the companies that tried to bring these worlds to the public are gone, although there are now many successful multiplayer gaming environments (that Amy Jo Kim and others will discuss at PopTech). Along with the demise of many innovative startups, we are now seeing unprecedented organizational failure across the world. Organizational failure, at the corporate or governmental level, is possibly the biggest factor that will prevent us from becoming better planetary stewards and averting a global eco-disaster.

I think it is fair to say that today we have to try different business models that are more dynamic, less hierarchical, give people stakeholdership and are not subject to the same risk as shareholder companies, where a hundred-year-old company with a Trojan horse full of freebooter raiders can bite the dust in a couple of years. So what I’ve done with a few colleagues, and working in parallel with Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons initiative, is to begin to form a new type of company we call a “commons.” A commons is a merger of Deek Hock’s VISA “chaordic” governance model with the online economic community and reputation system of eBay with Ray Krok’s shared intellectual property in the McDonald’s system and finally, with the collective buying power and quality control of a Costco. This commons is being designed to serve the needs of the cyberspace software and services community in the area of free speech and collaboration.

The commons is aimed at solving a key business problem, which is that even an open-source or other independently produced piece of software is not much use to you unless you can find someone who can help you install it, support it, and customize it. Well, how do you find these people? How can you trust them to do a good job? There have been things like guru.com, but most of those efforts are gone, and no marketplace or agora has ever really been formally instituted for people who are into software and interactivity. That is what the Web was supposed to have brought us.

The Intercommons marketplace will have four concepts at work: (1) people, or the members; (2) opportunities, that is, I need a voice server, or I have an idea about how to do X; (3) projects, which are what happens when opportunities and people connect; and (4) the resultant tools or products, the ongoing innovation owned by the community members or in the public domain as open source. Each one of these categories will have a reputation system so you can sort through and say, ‘OK, this is the most experienced member X who knows about highly regarded tool Y, and I’ll hire her.’ Needless to say, this will take some time to build. My co-presenter at PopTech, Jordan Pollack, will have more to say about this topic, I’m sure.

The fundamental core focus of the Intercommons is to create independent networks of communications and collaboration to secure free speech and organization through cyberspace. Instant messaging (IM) is a key technology for the benefit of society in the future. One day you may request an ambulance through IM, or people’s heart monitors may report in through an IM system. Today, most messages are sent through private, proprietary corporate networks not regulated in the public interest. One of the independent networks who have used the Intercommons IM tools is about 100 rabbis, and their community is all about discussing how evangelical Christians are converting Jews, and what to do about it? They can’t use proprietary systems such as AOL IM, Yahoo Instant Messaging or anything else — because their topic area is just too darned sensitive. They ask, who’s monitoring them? They want to run their own servers and have guarantees about independence. There simply have to be alternative, independent networks or cyberspace will be completely coopted by commercial entities that are increasingly undergoing catastrophic failure themselves. Cyberspace and its future potential for good cannot be put to such risk.

Over time, that’s what seems to have emerged as a common theme for the Intercommons mission: services, people and tools providing free speech and guaranteed privacy. After 9/11 there are those who fear that there are entities who would mount further attacks and others who fear the curbing of human rights and free speech by organs of our own government. Regardless of the source, fear motivates people to look seriously at their networks of communication online and say, “There is a presumption of privacy, but the only guarantee of privacy is really having the independence of administering all of our own tools.” I think this is an important theme that ought to be taken up at PopTech.

So you’re guaranteed privacy if you control your own tools?

We’re saying that you have a better shot at it if you are sitting next to the box that’s carrying your private voice channel and monitoring what’s going in and out. Besides, many people don’t want a free service that’s pushing banner ads and collecting their profiles or allowing someone or some agency to monitor their conversations. It’s unfortunate that we’re in this kind of mindset, and perhaps a lot of it is really “X Files” stuff and not actually happening.

Or perhaps it is. Is the target audience of Intercommons made up of individuals or businesses?

It’s aimed at free agents, who may represent themselves or small or large companies or universities and even government agencies. DigitalSpace, our little company of 16 people which is being transformed into the commons, has done every type of software and content project you can imagine from open to proprietary source and has built up a great clientele. We’re using ourselves as guinea pigs for this experiment. By the time Galen and I are at PopTech we will be “The Digital Space Commons” and be working hard on the Intercommons marketplace. We’re pulling in a bunch of indie world-rock musicians who are going to be beta-testers for Larry’s Creative Commons, and at the same time, indie coders, visionaries and marketers to build the Intercommons.

Any thoughts about the need to expand the public domain with efforts similar to Creative Commons?

We were involved in consulting for the Creative Commons project before its launch. One of the original ideas kicked around was for the creation of some kind of software or innovation repository where you could say, “This piece of technology is declared to be in the public domain.” After several months of discussion about this, everyone involved decided that this was a highly risky approach, and that any entity that purported to be a repository of such stuff, upon the first legal attack by patent attorneys, would probably just go bust.

So Creative Commons took a different approach, then.

From that discussion, Larry Lessig and his folks decided not to pursue a patentable code repository. The Creative Commons is a licensing generator, it’s not a repository. If you’re an indie musician you can go there and go click, click, click, and attach a license to your music, and the license can say, “This is in the public domain for the following people: college radio, indie stations, but not for commercial buyers.” The only protection it seems for software innovation is to either have a floor of lawyers, or to distribute stakeholdership in the innovation as widely as you can.

Larry Lessig is the Paul Revere of our times. We’re still looking for the George Washington. You know, the English troops are here, and they’re big, powerful and all around us.

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