Joi Ito's Web

On May 24, together with Nate Silver, Caterina Fake and Kahlil Gibran Muhammad, I will receive an honorary doctorate from The New School. Thanks to Nancy Lublin and everyone at The New School for making this happen.

It turns out that I'm actually an alum of The New School. Back in the fall of 1985, I took and completed two online courses - "Artificial Intelligence & Life" and "Propaganda: Lit Science" which were part of a batch of the first fully online graduate school courses for credit. (MOOC schMOOC!) It used a pre-World Wide Web system called EIES. I remember these courses fondly, especially the Propaganda course. They were really engaging and involved a lot of peer learning.

With all of the excitement about massive open online courses (MOOCs), it's interesting to reflect that we've been doing versions of these since the 80s.

Last year, MIT asked me to walk with the faculty during commencement, but I didn't have a academic robe. MIT offered to let me wear an MIT robe, but I felt it would be "grammatically incorrect" for me to wear a robe posing as a college graduate so I opted not to attend the official commencement. This year, I'll be able to walk with the faculty proudly wearing my gown from The New School. ;-)

And no, I won't make you call me "Doctor Ito". Ha!

Shaka just released his book, Writing My Wrongs that you can buy on his website. It's an amazing book and an amazing story. I just attended the book launch party earlier this week and have posted some photos on Flickr. Shaka is one of the MIT Media Lab Director's Fellows, a Knight Foundation BMe award winner and one of the most inspirational friends I have. I was honored to write the following foreword to the book.

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On July 1, 2012, the MIT Media Lab announced that we would be creating an Innovators Guild-a team of scholars, executives, and designers that would go to communities around the world using the power of innovation to help people. Our first focus for this was Detroit.

Three weeks later the Knight Foundation, which was funding our trip, organized a meeting with Detroit community leaders. We gave presentations about MIT and the Media Lab and about how we had come to Detroit to explore how we could create innovative solutions to long-standing problems.

Then, during the Q&A, a tough-looking black man with dreadlocks stood up and spoke. "Many well-meaning people come to Detroit with a missionary mentality. Then they get discouraged when they realize how just how tough our problems are. If you want to make a real impact you have to go out among the people in the communities and not buy into the romanticized view of Detroit based on Midtown and Downtown." Although there were other comments expressing skepticism, this one stood out. We realized, for the first time, that we were looking into the face of reality-The Truth.

After the formal part of the meeting, the man came up to us and introduced himself as Shaka. He said that if we were willing he would show us the real Detroit. We immediately accepted the offer. On the next trip we avoided Downtown altogether and went straight to Brightmore on Detroit's West Side, a neighborhood full of burned-out, vacant homes and liquor stores fronted with bulletproof glass. Shaka told us stories that had none of the romance, but they were real.

We quickly realized that we couldn't just fly in, do good, and go home. We needed to introduce ourselves to the community, learn about the people who live there, and build trust. If we wanted to have a positive impact on Detroit we had to be there for the long haul.

In the following weeks, my team from the Media Lab and creatives from the design firm IDEO flew to Detroit, working with Shaka and others to come up with a plan for how we might be able to join the community and work together. We then invited Shaka and the Detroit team to the MIT Media Lab to meet students and faculty and see and learn about what we do. Bonds began forming between the Lab and the Detroiters.

In October, we all converged on Detroit-setting up a base at the headquarters of OmniCorpDetroit, a vital, local organization. We were a team of community leaders, chief innovation officers, students, and designers. Each of the teams started working on projects ranging from solving the streetlight issue to urban farming. Shaka emerged as our natural leader, keeping the energy high and the teams working together.

By the end of an insanely productive three days, I had a plan. I would make Shaka a MIT Media Lab Fellow and he'd be our man in Detroit-our connection to the incredibly important world he represents. Since then, Shaka and the Media Lab team have started to work together extensively, and Shaka continues to inspire and challenge us.

In December, Shaka emailed me that he had a rough draft of his memoirs and asked if I was interested in reading it. I read the entire book in two sittings, riveted. Shaka is, among his other talents, an amazing storyteller. The book is funny and moving and astute and by the end I felt as if I had been the one convicted of murder, as if I'd spent seven years in the hole, and gone through the dramatic transformation from angry, scared young boy, to enlightened teacher and leader.

And by the end I could begin to see how a generation of bright children full of promise are channeled into a system that sees them as little more than felons-in-waiting. Yet again, Shaka has inspired me to help right the wrongs by, in this instance, helping him "write the wrongs". The book may be about Shaka's past, but it points to a future in which we all take the next step to build a more just society.

Back in the early 90's, I had a small startup called Eccosys. It was started by a rag tag team of friends in my apartment. We knew a lot about the Internet, but few else in Japan did. As the Internet started to get more and more press, a lot of companies started creating and trying to sell Internet products.

Eccosys struggled to get "real" Internet related work. Then, I met Kaoru Hayashi, the CEO of From Garage. From Garage was a small advertising production and planning shop that had literally started in a garage a few blocks from my apartment. Dentsu was one of From Garage's biggest clients. From Garage and Eccosys made a unique team of Internet-enabled producers, and we helped a bunch of companies launch Internet-related products like Sun's Java, IBM's OS2 Warp, and Lotus Notes' Merchant Server. It turned out that in the early days, there was much more money to be made helping people talk about the Internet than actually making money doing anything on the Internet.

As more and more work from Dentsu and others went "digital" Kaoru and I decided that it made sense to formally join forces and in 1995, we created Digital Garage and merged all of our companies into one company. At Digital Garage, with the help of the ad agencies, we launched Infoseek Japan and began the first effort to sell ads by CPM - Cost Per Thousand (impressions).

In Japan, there are a number of huge ad agencies. As the story goes, each of original ad agencies picked a medium and specialized. Dentsu, which is short of "electronic communications" in Japanese, picked radio and TV and hit a jackpot as these media turned out to be the winners. In a uniquely Japanese way, Dentsu not only advertised, but they lead the way in the development of the media supporting their innovation and business development.

Digital Garage and Dentsu have worked together closely for decades, but I'm super-excited that we are now "family" with today's announcement of the decision for Dentsu to make a significant investment in Digital Garage and create a business alliance.

Jeff and I spent the day cranking on our book. Feeling good about the structure of the book and we made a lot of progress.

One of the things I decided I need to do is to get my blog voice back so - hello!

We still don't even have a real title for the book, but we're close. Watch this space for more about the book as we get rolling.

On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus. Since then, his family has received no official explanation for his detention or information regarding his whereabouts. However, his family has recently learned from previous detainees at the security branch of Kafer Sousa, Damascus, that Bassel is being held at this location.

Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian-born Syrian, 31, is a respected computer engineer specializing in open source software development, the type of contributions the Internet is built upon. He launched his career ten years ago in Syria, working as a technical director for a number of local companies on cultural projects like restoring Palmyra and Forward Syria Magazine.

Since his arrest, Bassel's valuable volunteer work, both in Syria and around the world, has been stopped. His absence has been painful for the communities that depend on him. In addition, his family, and his fiancée whom he was due to marry this past April, have had their lives put on hold.

Bassel Khartabil has been unjustly detained for nearly four months without trial or any legal charges being brought against him. -- freebassel.org

This is our statement of Support to Bassel, his family and friends.

Creative Commons supports efforts to obtain the release of Bassel Safadi, a valuable contributor to and leader in the technology community. Bassel's expertise and focus across all aspects of his work has been in support of the development of publicly available, free, open source computer software code and technology. He pursues this not only through his valuable volunteer efforts in support of Creative Commons, but in all of his work in the technology field. Through his efforts, the quality and availability of freely available and open technology is improved and technology is advanced.

Please help us #FREEBASSEL by signing the support letter at freebassel.org.

Photo I took of Daniel in 2009 when we met for drink in a maid cafe in LA.

I just finished reading Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez. Daniel became one of my favorite science fiction writers when I read Daemon. Steward Brand turned me on to Daemon. If you haven't read Deamon, you should. I wrote about it back in 2008. After Daemon, Daniel wrote a sequel, Freedom™, which was also awesome.

In addition to being gripping thrillers that you can't put down, the books are all based on existing or near future technologies that make the stories amazingly scary and plausible. When Daniel wrote Daemon he was "an independent systems consultant to Fortune 100 companies. He has designed enterprise software for the defense, finance and entertainment industries," and can actually hack most of the technology that he talks about in his books.

In Daemon and Freedom™ the theme was a kind of MMORPG world gone wild where the online takes over the real world.

In Kill Decision, Daniel pivots and takes us to a world where autonomous mass-produced swarming drones establish a new era of warfare. There is an interesting discussion in the book where one of the characters argues the following:

In the middle ages, trained, mounted, armored knights could do an asymmetrical amount of damage taking out huge numbers of peasants making them an important unit of power. (Think Game of Thrones :-) ) This influenced the architecture of government - feudalism. Later, with the invention of gunpowder, a large number of mostly unskilled peasants properly armed with rifles could take on a relatively large number opponents, leveling the play field and paving the way for democracy.

WIth the autonomous drones empowered with the kill decision, brute force manufacturing and big data analysis - in other words money - could become the primary force of power.

Whether you're talking to Lessig about the corruption of modern lawmaking by special interests or the #occupy movement, it's clear that money and the aggregation of financial power is out of control and taking over the world. In Kill Decision, Daniel takes this trend and connects it very directly to the technology that we're all so excited about and adds a deadly and exciting twist.

There are a number of important elements of the story that take place in research labs at universities and it was a lot of fun comparing some of the characters to people in my new life at the Media Lab. (Looking forward to Daniel visiting the Media Lab.)

Overall, really great book. I totally recommend it and props to Daniel for totally nailing the timing. In case you missed it, see the Ted talk on autonomous quadrcopters from this year's TED which play a big role in in Kill Decision. I also loved the little details like the dig on Comic Sans. ;-)

The book comes out July 19 and you can pre-order it on his website.

Obviously, this is just one student and doesn't necessarily generalize, but I love that the electrodermal activity is nearly flatlined during classes. ;-) (Note that the activity is higher during sleep than during class...)

"Changes in skin conductance at the surface, referred to as electrodermal activity (EDA), reflect activity within the sympathetic axis of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and provide a sensitive and convenient measure of assessing alterations in sympathetic arousal associated with emotion, cognition, and attention."

From:

Poh, M.Z., Swenson, N.C., Picard, R.W., "A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity," IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol.57, no.5, pp.1243-1252, May 2010. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2009.2038487 PDF

I have some amazing friends who tell me that when they were young, they read the dictionary from cover to cover. Other friends of mine have read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

My sister calls me an "interest driven learner." I think that's code for "short attention span" or "not a good long term planner" or something like that. I can't imagine being able to read the dictionary from cover to cover. In fact, I don't think most people could sit down and read the dictionary from cover to cover.

Although reading the dictionary and the encyclopedia from cover to cover may seem a bit extreme, it often feels like that's what we're asking kids to do who go through formal education.

Courses are organized, sequenced in a very structured way as student scurry from class to class sitting through lectures and expected to pay attention as instructors go on and on about calculus, history and grammar.

Students with the ability to focus and motivate themselves either through the need to achieve good grades or through understanding the long term benefits of a good education are able to succeed.

Personally, I find the dictionary, the encyclopedia and videos online as excellent resources when I need to learn something. I find the need to learn things every day in the course of pursuing interests, preparing for meetings and interacting with exciting people. I'm extremely motivated to learn and I learn a lot.

I love the videos of professors, amateurs and instructors putting their courseware online. They are a great resource for interest driven learners like me. However, I wonder whether we should be structuring the future of learning as online universities where you are asked to do the equivalent of reading the encyclopedia from cover to cover online. Shouldn't we be looking at the Internet as an amazing network enabling "The Power of Pull" and be empowering kids to learn through building things together rather than assessing their ability to complete courses and produce the right "answers"?

Over the weekend, I participated in the Festival of Learning at the Media Lab. It was a student organized event in the spirit of the MIT Independant Activities Period, but even scrappier and more agile. It was a blast and reminded me why the Media Lab is so cool.

Festival of Learning

The Festival of Learning was a two-day festival on 27-28 Jan 2012, where anyone from MIT's E14 and E15 could teach, learn, and collaborate!

Check out our EPIC LIST OF FESTIVAL SESSIONS, with photos, slides, source code, blog posts, and descriptions for everything that happened!

Also check out the videos below and our Flickr group to see what happened. We made mochi, painted faces, learned CAD, sang two notes at once, played MMOs, built fighter kites, filled a balloon room, discussed research methods, and much much more :-)

I organized a session on MMOs with Misha and we talked about the history of and the theory behind MMOs and did a demo. We used Star Wars the Old Republic instead of the World of Warcraft because it's the shiny new MMO. We tried to show what a group activity looked like by running a Flash Point, but it turns out that it wasn't that interesting and we lost some of our participants while we tried to quickly go through the instance. One of the problems is that it's hard to focus on playing a game while explaining what's going on. I think that there is a more fundamental difficulty in demoing online worlds, especially immersive ones.

Later we let people roll characters of their own and try playing. I think that part was a bit more successful.

This is the first MMO workshop that I've ever tried to organize and we learned a lot. I'm not positive what the perfect format is, but I'm hoping we get a chance to do it again and that we can iterate on it.

I just posted a blog post on the MIT Media Lab blog officially taking a position against SOPA and PIPA. This is a longer blog post co-authored with Ethan Zuckerman describing the issue in more detail.

SOPA - the Stop Online Piracy Act - and a sister bill, PIPA - the Protect IP Act - seek to minimize the dissemination of copyrighted material online by targeting sites that promote and enable the sharing of copyright-protected material, like The Pirate Bay. While this goal may be laudable, entrepreneurs, legal scholars and free speech activists are worried about the consequences of these bills for the architecture of the Internet. At the MIT Media Lab, we share those concerns, and we oppose SOPA and PIPA as threats to innovation on the Internet.

To limit access to rogue sites, SOPA and PIPA would:

- supersede the "notice and takedown" method of policing for copyrighted material on Internet services and require service providers to police content uploaded by users or prevent users from uploading copyrighted content
- require Internet Service Providers to change their DNS servers and block resolution of the domain names of websites in other countries that host illegal copies of content
- require search engines to modify their search results to exclude foreign websites that illegally host copyrighted material
- order payment processors like PayPal and ad services like Google AdSense to cease doing business with foreign websites that illegally host copyrighted content

Major internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, oppose SOPA and PIPA because it changes the liability rules around copyright infringement. Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, companies are protected from charges of "contributory infringement" on content uploaded by users, so long as the company follows a procedure and remove infringing content when an alert process is followed. SOPA substantially alters this system, and internet companies worry that without protection from contributory infringement, user-generated content sites like YouTube and Twitter would not have come into existence. The burden of reviewing user-submitted content - every blog post, every video, every image - would be impossible for a company to manage, and companies would have likely stuck with the Web 1.0 model of publishing edited, vetted content instead of moving to a Web 2.0 model where users create the content. Several internet companies took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to express their concerns about SOPA and PIPA.

Free speech advocates, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, worry that SOPA may provide powerful new tools to silence online speech. Confronted with uncomfortable political speech, repressive governments often seek to silence dissent by reporting content as defamatory, slanderous or copyright infringing, hoping the companies hosting the speech will remove the content. SOPA accelerates the process of copyright removal, with a mechanism that permits copyright holders to obtain court orders against sites hosting copyrighted materials and have those sites rapidly blocked. Scholars of online censorship, like Rebecca MacKinnon at the New America Foundation, worry that SOPA may be popular with the Chinese government as with the copyright holders who are lobbying for the bill.

US law already permits the seizure of domestic domain names that are used for piracy, and the US seized 150 domains in November. SOPA is an attempt to enforce copyright provisions across international borders by prohibiting American internet users from accessing certain foreign websites, like The Pirate Bay. In effect, it would create a firewall to prevent users from accessing prohibited intellectual property, much as China's "great firewall" limits access to politically sensitive information.

Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Tribe believes that SOPA is likely unconstitutional, as it can remove constitutionally protected speech without a hearing, a form of "prior restraint". In a memo sent to members of Congress, he points out that SOPA proposes a system where a single instance of prohibited material could lead to the blocking of thousands of unrelated pieces of content.

Internet experts have observed that, beyond being dangerous to innovation, harmful to speech and potentially unconstitutional, SOPA and PIPA are unlikely to work. Countries that block access to prohibited websites by altering the domain name system - as Vietnam does in blocking access to Facebook - find that millions of users are able to circumvent this form of censorship. Millions of Vietnamese users have become Facebook users by entering that site's IP address into their browsers, or configuring their computers to use an uncensored DNS server. It's likely that dedicated US users of The Pirate Bay and other sites will do likewise. Effectively blocking access to sites like The Pirate Bay might require US ISPs to install powerful and expensive "deep packet inspection" software, a cost that would inevitably be passed onto their users.

The progress of the bills was slowed in late 2011 by widespread online activism opposing SOPA and PIPA. Hearings are likely to resume early in 2012, and opponents of the bills are facing off against organized lobbying campaigns by the music and film industries who support the legislation. On November 16, 2011, participatory media company Tumblr took strong online action against SOPA, redirecting requests for content on the site to a page that urged users to call US representatives and oppose the bill - their daylong campaign generated more than 87,000 calls to Congress. Internet community site Reddit plans a site-wide "blackout" on January 18th to inform users of the potential harms of SOPA and PIPA. Wikipedia is considering doing the same.

In the spirit of these protests, the MIT Media Lab has linked this blogpost to all our site pages, encouraging anyone interested in the work we do to learn more about SOPA and PIPA. More information and resources follow below. We believe that SOPA and PIPA would make it harder for Media Lab students, researchers and faculty to do what we do best: create innovative technologies that anticipate the future by creating it. We hope you'll join with us in opposing these bills and, if you are a US citizen, in letting your representatives know your concerns about this legislation.

- Joi Ito, director, MIT Media Lab

Selected resources on SOPA and PIPA

Liz Dwyer, "Why SOPA Could Kill the Open Educational Resource Movement", Good Magazine

Julian Sanchez, "SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship", Cato Institute

Dan Rowinsky, "What You Need to Know about SOPA in 2012", ReadWriteWeb

"Internet Blacklist Legislation", Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF's email campaign against the legislation and EFF guide to meeting with your representatives.