Interview with David Weinberger

You offer _Small Pieces Loosely Joined_ as a way of thinking about the web. I hate to ask you to summarize a concept that filled a whole book, but could you give us an abstract of your thinking? Why are they small, and why are they loose?

For a few thousand years, we've assumed that the larger the project, the more control and management it needs. As the project scales, the required control has to scale, too. So, we amass gigantic org charts that are top-down and highly hierarchical.

Along comes the largest network ever built. The largest collection of human creativity, intricately threaded. Something like 20 billion pages, over 500 million people. And how many managers did it take to build it? None. Control was removed from the center of the network on purpose because the creators of the Internet understood that that was the only way to get it to scale. If there were managers of the Internet, we'd be filling out forms like a Request to Download and a Request to Forward.

The result is that when we're out on the Web, we implicitly understand that we're in a permission-free zone that has none of the usual management and control structures.

So, to answer your question (sort of): The pieces are us and what of ourselves we have put on the Net. The pieces are small because they're generally fragments of a life, not carefully researched "products" produced by megacorps. The pieces are loosely joined because the structure of the Web is determined by the hyperlinks we've put in, each one of us, representing our own shifting and amorphous interests.

That's the book's starting assumption. From there it tries to show the ways in which our experience of the Web helps to clarify and correct some of our most important real-world misunderstandings of what it means to be a human in a shared world.

Can you give an example or two?

Here's one. Much of our language about the Web treats it as if it were a place: entering and leaving sites, visiting a site, etc. I take that seriously. The Web feels like a place to us. Yet how much more non-spatial could it be? We copy pages from remote locations and then display them on a 2D screen. So, there's a conundrum: why does such a non-spatial place nevertheless present itself to us in spatial terms?

I think the answer is that our RW idea of space is screwy. Thanks to Newton and Descartes, we think of space as an abstract container that consists of equidistant points in three dimensions. Obviously that's a highly useful way to think about space, but it doesn't capture our lived experience. In daily, unreflective life we don't experience space at all. We experience places: your living room, your basement, a restaurant, your cubicle, the corner you're sent to when you're bad, and so on. Places have meaning and emotional qualities. And, of course, places are navigable: I can get from one to another. But that's exactly what the Web consists of: navigable places that have meaning and emotional qualities. The Web feels spatial because it shares those most important qualities of RW space. And, in so doing our Web experience clarifies something about our RW experience of space: we don't live in an abstract container devoid of qualities but in a world that consists of places that mean something to us. We shouldn't have to be reminded of this, but we've elevated the scientific viewpoint to such an extent that we often think that abstract space is real and places are "merely subjective." Because the Web doesn't have a container or abstract grid points we can't make that mistake there.

I.e., are you saying that 'cyberspace' is really not a metaphor for external, physical reality, but for an internal, conceptual construction based on our *experience* of space? I think that's what you were telling me, and I'm thinking about the implications.

That's what I'm saying, but run through your filter. But the book in fact argues against the idea that we experience the world via "internal, conceptual constructions." That's important because the notion that we live the world inside our heads has led us to claims about the nature of what's real, e.g., that's what's most real is what exists independent of our "inner representations." Phenomenology (among other branches of philosophy) has rejected the inner/outer dualism. I like phenomenology because of its subtle thinking about the various ways in which things are without having to say absurd things like "dreams are as real as rocks," etc. Our culture has worked itself into a binary corner (?) in which we reserve the word "real" only for that which is most fiercely independent of our awareness of it. There's utility in that view but also a lot of alienation: what's most real is that which escapes our awareness. That makes brute matter the most real and the meaning of the things and places in our life the least real. Ay caramba! The Web, on the other hand, presents a world in which meaning and matter can't be separated and thus we can't trick ourselves into believing that what's real about the Web is its matter.

(This interview is going down a very abstract path very quickly, Jon. How about asking about virtual cathouses or the future of banner ads or something? :)

Sorry to push the abstraction, let's "get real." What is the material relevance of your vision of the web? From your perspective, what is the web for?

Don't apologize! I purposefully avoided the question of material relevance in "Small Pieces" because I wanted to talk about the Web as an idea. Just as you can explore the nature of democracy by looking at the set of ideas it involves -- freedom, liberty, authority, rights, etc. -- I wanted to explore the nature of the Web as an idea.

So, what is the Web for? It's pretty amazing that we have 500M+ people on the Web and we don't have an answer to that question. The very vagueness of our understanding seems to me to indicate the profundity of the phenomenon. How do you explain the importance the Web has assumed if we can't even routinely articulate what it's for?

And I don't have an answer beyond the obvious: we're there to connect. We are soeager to connect with others. And part of the appeal of the Web way of connecting is that we get to do so in our own voice...or our own voices, to be more accurate. We get to talk about what we want in the way that we want. We get to write ourselves into existence. Pretty thrilling.

Is this why weblogs have become so prevalent as a source of content du jour?

Yes. They're actually a good example. What started out as the posterchild for meaningless self-expression and self-assertion turns out to be all about connection: webloggers link to others, take up conversational threads, argue and encourage, and form webs of interest. That's why it's not enough to say that the Web is about voice; it's about voices connecting. The Web is a conversation.

Does this conversation have political as well as social significance?

Eventually, doesn't it have to? Politics these days obviously is merely an extension of the broadcast mentality. It's going to take a while, I'm afraid, to break the lock of top-down political brand marketing. But it'll happen. It already is in some obvious ways -- the spread of political information, misinformation and jokes on the Net.

By the way, it seems to me that there's one way that the Net will certainly not affect politics: through online petitions. Gathering petitions is mass-marketing thinking. And because it's so easy to sign an online petition, they have no effect. You want a petition to make a nice thudding sound when it plops on the politician's desk. Bits just don't weigh enough. On the other hand, MoveOn.org uses direct e-marketing to amass money and was able to raise over $1.4M in three days for four campaigns in trouble in the recent election. Now _$1.4M_ has a nice thud!

Even so, I expect real political change to come from the Web's way of letting us pull together into groups of people who know one another, not from its mass-ness.

Do you think this implies a change in power structures and methods of governance, or something subtler?

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

First we need the frozen groundswell. Only then will the power structure change.

(On the other hand, Frost continues: "The work of hunters is another thing...")

Guess the question is whether it'll be evolution or revolution. > What projects are on your plate that you'd like people to know about?

Projects? Projects?? Aren't we in a post-project society already? Please??

There are a couple of big pieces of work that may be in the offing. In the meantime, I write too much in my weblog everyday (http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger), as well as writing columns and doing some radio stuff. Over the past few months I've gotten fairly deeply involved in discussions about Open Spectrum and I spend time writing and worrying about the persistent attacks on our digital rights. So, my plate is overflowing with many small projects loosely joined. Hmm, not a bad title for a book...