Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Howard Rheingold is a colorful character in every sense of the word. From his psychedelic painted shoes, to his extraordinary legacy of groundbreaking visionary books.
Howard offers a unique and incisive approach to creativity and learning. Most people know Howard from his writing about virtual communities and mind amplification, but he's also a gifted and innovative educator. In his role as a professor at Stanford and UC Berkeley, Howard reimagined the relationship between student and teacher as co-learners in keeping with his deep and long term [00:01:00] interest in collaboration.
Howard: Ultimately, I got to the point of asking my students to co teach with me. So they broke up into teams of two or three, and they would come up with a plan. I taught a three hour course, and so they were responsible for an hour of that course, and we would develop the plan together and there, Assignment was not to try to cover everything in the syllabus that week, but to try to get people engaged as much as possible and what they felt was important.
And somehow or another, when you begin to take more responsibility for your learning, instead of the teachers, their teachers responsible for conveying it, you're responsible for memorizing it. then it gets exciting. Uh, it really can ignite a kind of excitement. I didn't know at the beginning how well this would work, but once it started working, I was able to say to the students at the beginning, the co learning can be magical.
I can't guarantee that the magic can happen. I can't make it happen. Just by [00:02:00] facilitating it, you have to help, but it does happen, and the students project so much authority on the teacher that when you authoritatively say, we can cooperate, we can learn cooperatively rather than competitively, they begin to believe that.
And then they get excited about it. It's no longer just about what's on the test. It's about what is it about the subject matter that engages me.
Amy: Listen in and find out how this web pioneer thinks about bullshit detection and the future of collaborative learning.
Welcome to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Howard: Very happy to talk with you.
Amy: Well, it's great to reconnect. You know, you and I have known each other for many years. And we've had these parallel paths exploring areas and I've always looked at you as a forward scout and an innovator. So I'm thrilled to catch up with you and learn more about [00:03:00] what you're up to now and what you're seeing in the future, as well as giving my listeners a sense about your past.
So let's start off with just a glimpse into your life. So I know there's probably no typical day, but what are your days filled with now? Like, what was life like last Thursday? Just give us a sense.
Howard: Some people want to talk to me like you do. And I try to arrange that to happen in the morning. So we'll do an interview or a conversation.
Sometimes it's journalists or podcasts and often it's, it's students. And although I, I retired from Stanford and from Berkeley. If a student finds their way to me, I'm always happy to talk to them. So, uh, then, you know, I do my social media and I have a garden nine months out of the year, I live most of the time out there.
So I head out to the garden. I do, um, stretching exercises, weight exercises, just get myself in shape, do a little meditation. That's pretty [00:04:00] much the way it has always been. In the olden days, I would then move my laptop out to the garden and work, whether I was writing a book or preparing to teach a class or even teaching an online class.
I would, I would do that outside. I'm making art full time now. So it's very exciting to me, even though I've been doing this a couple of years now to just get up and work on an art project all day. When I was writing books, I wrote articles, as you have for many years. And the great thing about reading writing articles is that you get to be a Dante.
You, you find something that really interests you and you learn about it, and you find a way to write something interesting about it, and then you move on. That's also the downside thing about writing books, is you get to think about the same thing day after day, week after week, month after month, and, and that that develops.
And, and, and the same thing is true of art. I'm a big believer in the, [00:05:00] whether you want to call it subconscious or unconscious, the part. of the creative process that takes place while you're doing other things while you're, even while you're sleeping. So it's nice to be able to work on an art project that takes a while and matures in your consciousness.
And I have switched from sharing on Facebook to sharing on Patreon where a lot of artists are very gratifying. It's really the difference between an audience and a public.
Amy: Tell us more about that. What it's like to interact with your audience and this difference between an audience and a public.
Howard: Well, first of all, I've always shared online, you know, I'm a writer.
That's what writers do. And, you know, starting on the well in 1985 and various blogs and various forms of sharing online, I found that For everything that I give away, I get it back 10 times. And that's, that's an application of social capital online, which is one of the things that I taught my [00:06:00] students.
It may or may not be true in daily face-to-face life, but it certainly is true online that if you're generous, people will be generous with you. And it vastly expanded my ability to explore different subjects. If I'm interested in something, there's somebody in my network who can point me the right way.
Which connects with the idea of personal learning networks, which I'll talk about in a minute. Then, of course, when Facebook became the place where you could find everyone you know, it was natural for me to share there two or three or four times a day. You know, it was really the exposure of surveillance capitalism and the inability of Facebook's management to really tame the monster that was Facebook.
They've created and, you know, in retrospect, we could have seen this and I wrote a couple of articles about what I call data valence back in the 1990s. We've known for a long [00:07:00] time that we leave digital trails and that those digital trails can be collected into dossiers of information about us. And it's kind of benign that it's people who want to sell things.
To us, you know, I'm happy for Amazon to know what I'm interested in, but I don't think anybody could have predicted the degree to which Facebook's surveillance on and off Facebook is going to Has created these dossiers on billions of people that enable not only micro targeting of advertising but what some people are now calling computational propaganda.
Distorting the public sphere that's so important to democracy and enabling bad actors to do bad things. So I don't think that quitting Facebook is going to have any effect on Facebook. If a million people did it today, that would be What one two thousandth of their population, but I don't feel so comfortable with my [00:08:00] sharing contributing to that.
So I'm happier with Patreon because they're not in the business of collecting information about me to sell to advertisers. And Patreon patrons can support creators. They can say, I'll, I'll give you $2 a month or $5 every time you produce a video. And we creators have a choice of making what we create public or, uh, making it exclusive for only our patrons.
So I'm still able to do that, to contribute to the public sphere by making about half of my contributions public. I don't really think this is going to take over the entire web. But I really support the idea that we can support each other, instead of getting something for quote free in exchange for a lot of information about ourselves and our friends that are used not only for advertising but for propaganda. And it's, it's gratifying to have people [00:09:00] in mind when I share something who believe in me enough to, to give me a dollar a month.
It's not so much in dollar a month as the book for believing in what I'm doing. And of course, creators support each other.
Amy: Wow. That's fascinating. It reminds me in some ways of some of the stories of your experience on the well.
Howard: Absolutely. That's where I learned it. I had been in a room with a typewriter for a good 10 years when The Well came along, and two things excited me about it.
One was, it was like writing as a performing art. People would write things in response to each other in almost real time. And the other thing I liked about it was that I got to know people and got to know what they were interested in. And if I found something that I knew that they would be interested in, I could share it.
And, again, those people would learn about me, and I would get ten times back what I put out. Having started out as a writer with a [00:10:00] typewriter, a library card, and a telephone as my research tools, having a network of people who had their own research going on, that was really, it was exciting. It was exciting to have fun, but also to share knowledge.
And that really has not changed. Online there are a lot more people online. There's a lot more people with bad intentions online, but one has the choice of selecting who to pay attention to online. And from that, you can create what I learned from other educators. It's called a personal learning network, for example, when I started making little videos for educational purposes.
I looked around and I found a couple of people's blogs who were knowledgeable about doing that, and I went and I found that they had Twitter accounts, and I followed them on Twitter, and I found the people that they followed, some of them were also knowledgeable, and [00:11:00] I was able to learn from that network, and ultimately Particularly the networks of educators, but I think anyone, a personal learning network is not just a network of people you learn from, it's a network of people who learn together, because nobody is going to give something to you until you have demonstrated that you're willing to give to others.
So I actually wrote a thing about this call. Um, I call it Twitter literacy. Um, and if you search on that term, you'll find it. But the first thing you want to do is, is just pay attention to someone and find out what they're interested in. And then if you have an opportunity to give them something.
That you know that they would be interested in that that brings you to their attention in a positive way and after a while they get to recognize you and maybe you can ask them a question, you know, it's, it's very much like a teacher and a student or a person and a new acquaintance. You don't just exploit them, [00:12:00] you establish a relationship with them.
And I'm still really enthusiastic about the opportunities for making friends, for supporting other people, for getting support from people, for sharing knowledge. There's now a lot of trolling and really bad stuff online. And it's really a matter of, you have to control your attention, what you pay attention to.
Amy: Right. And a lot of the dynamics you're talking about are driven by the business models.
Howard: Yes. And again, these things don't, don't happen because of some kind of evil conspiracy. It's just kind of a, a slippery slope slide. I was at, at Wired when Hotwired created that, that first banner ad. And it was exciting that we could get companies to pay for broadcasting culture to people.
I know it sounds a little weird now, but in 1994, if you said you were going to make [00:13:00] money on the internet, people would laugh at you. So the idea of, of supporting culture through advertising was exciting. You know, previously I'd been. Editor of Whole Earth Review, which had been around for a couple of decades before I was there, and they had a policy of no advertising, just on ideological grounds.
They didn't want to participate in the advertising world. And I learned that, um, that Americans and people in general do not support cultural enterprises like magazines. By subscribing to them. It's always a mix of subscriptions and advertising, but in the old days, you would have sports illustrated and advertisers who wanted to sell things to people who are interested in sports would advertise there.
The magic model of Facebook and other advertisers is they can learn exactly who you are and exactly what you're interested in and target their ads to you. And that's great for the advertising business. [00:14:00] But as we've seen, it's not really a good thing to, to compile a dossier of information about a couple of billion people and allow that dossier to be misused.
So we got here through good intentions, but you know, I'll have to tell you, I've had many conversations about technology and, and, and where's it going and is it good for us and is it bad for us? And, and it always comes down to, well, it's, it's about capitalism. Isn't it? It's the, the, the technology is drawn to that gravitational force of what's going to make the money.
So that's, you know, I'm interested in Patreon. There are other possibilities of, of business models, you know, going back to Ted Nelson's 1970s Xanadu, he talked about us making micro payments to each other. The technology or the business to do that isn't there yet, but there are other paths.
Amy: Well, actually in games, it's completely there and dominating the [00:15:00] industry.
So, you know, as you know, Howard, I have a foot in both worlds, the product world, the internet world, and the games world. And microtransactions have really become the most dominant successful model in the games world. Fortnite is a good example of that. It's free-to-play and they're making millions and millions of dollars a month selling cosmetic items because it's such a good game.
Howard: Yeah.
Amy: So, and you know, and there's manipulative microtransaction models and then there's pretty benign microtransaction models like Fortnite, which is a great balance. So I think Ted Nelson was a visionary and just like everything else in game trickles down into the internet. This will too. And so like what you're exploring with Patreon is the cutting edge of this.
Howard: Yeah, you know, I'm not ready to give up on the value of social media. I think it's pretty clear that it's not automatically benign. And, [00:16:00] you know, if you got to kids, you've got to talk to them about it. And for your own mental health, you have to, you have to avoid some things and actively block other things and other people.
But you know, the whole web was, was not built by some company or some government. It was built by a bunch of people who wanted to put up web pages and link to each other.
Amy: Let's dig into cooperative systems, because that's really underlying our conversation. You know, Howard, when you talk about that, you have to share first to get people to share back, you know, just in terms of your attitude and your behaviors.
We're talking about cooperative systems and how they work. And there are, as you know, cause you've probably watched the gamification. You know, wave from afar. People are really enamored of zero sum systems that seem to be the answers to your engagement problems because they pit people against each other and motivate them, but those systems are [00:17:00] a small part of gaming and a very small part of social media.
Most social media is filled with these cooperative systems like like, you know, like is a cooperative system. And yet the systems are so powerful and complex that they have emergent properties that we couldn't predict.
Howard: You know, if you zoom back a little bit, you'll see that the, the cooperation and and obstacles to cooperation are part of everything we do.
I started thinking about this when I wrote my book, Smart Mobs, which was about the kind of social changes I was able to forecast in the year 2000 that would come with what's now known as the smartphone. And talking to sociologists about it, I concluded from their advice that the main social change we were seeing with millions and then billions of people carrying around devices that that [00:18:00] were little supercomputers that were linked to the Internet, that this was lowering the barriers to collective action.
And we first saw that in the political realm with the S. M. S. Revolution in the Philippines that overthrew the president of strata. We saw that 1999 with the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of incidents around the world in which citizens have been able to depose governments shift elections because they were able to organize and coordinate their activities with smartphones.
I started trying to zoom back to look at what the bigger picture was, and if you look into the idea of collective action, it turns out that there's a, there is a, a literature about that. I think most people are familiar with the story of the tragedy of the commons, in which Garrett Hardin, a population biologist, was talking about how the human race was going to do itself in through [00:19:00] overpopulation.
And he talked about the commons, uh, the common grazing areas that used to exist in cities. And people could graze their cattle there and nobody could own it. But eventually everybody would graze as many cattle as they could. And they would destroy the commons. And it's a tragedy, he said, because that's inevitable.
It turns out that there was a political scientist by the name of Eleanor Ostrom, who asked, is that really true? And she did a lot of research on it and all around the world, different forms of cooperation from, you know, water sharing to forestry to fisheries. And found that that there are instances in which people are able to make arrangements to overcome the obstacles to continuing use of a sustainable resource.
So there's a beginnings of an outline of a science of cooperation, but it's fragmented. There's a little bit in this political science work you talked about. You've got to share before you can expect people to share [00:20:00] with you, that's known as reciprocity. Things come from different disciplines and people in different disciplines don't know about each other.
So I did a TED talk on this in 2005, and then I worked with Institute for the Future for a few years. And I spent a couple of years trying to get some foundation support to create a kind of a cooperation academy where people could learn about it. There's the, you know, the biological, the evolutionary, the cultural, the political, economic levels.
And they all point to each other and and my feeling is that there was a time when people thought disease was caused by foreigners or sin or witchcraft, and then eventually someone invented a microscope and found out it was microorganisms. And if you boiled your water, you wouldn't get sick. And I think we're sort of in the pre microscope era and understanding really how humans cooperate.
What a huge payoff that would be. I did a, an eight-part [00:21:00] annotated reading list on my Patreon for people who want to explore the foundations of it, and you know what, none of it is so difficult that you can't understand it, and I think after you begin looking at it from different angles, I think of them as lenses and frames, you begin to see that there's something that can be learned about cooperation.
I think the exciting thing is that a sense of fairness, a sense of cooperation is not innate. It's something that's influenced by our culture, by the games we play as kids, by what our parents tell us, what they teach us in school. So I think we have the opportunity not only to learn more about how humans cooperate, but to try to nudge it for a more widespread and healthier cooperation.
And having said all that, I have to add that people cooperate to do bad things as well as good things. Just as we've learned, people use the internet to do bad things as well as good things.
Amy: Truth. [00:22:00] Yes. Like all powerful tools.
Howard: Yes. And in particular, this is one that, you know, communication tools depend a lot on intent and context.
There's a literacy issue for many years, since I started writing about digital media and networks in the 1980s, I've been asked by editors and reviewers and academics, do you think this stuff is any good for us? And I've been asking myself that question, and the conclusion I came to was that it depends.
There's a critical uncertainty, and the critical uncertainty has to do with the degree of cluefulness. How many people actually know how to use social media, how to protect themselves on social media, and how many people don't? How many people know how to determine the difference between good information and bad information?
I wrote a book, NetSmart, published in 2012 by MIT Press, in which I talked about five essential literacies, and, you know, I tend [00:23:00] to be about ten years ahead, so it's, it's really hitting hard now, but the first literacy was attention, and I think, you know, we were talking about very much. The business model of Facebook and other social media is based on capturing our attention and keeping our attention so that that attention can be sold to advertisers.
There's the idea that somehow that can be regulated on the production side, but I think what's more important is is self regulation learning. What to do with your attention. Certainly, if you are standing at a streetlight at any intersection in the world, I'm willing to bet that half the people or more standing there are looking at their phones.
Clearly, there's something happening with attention. And of course, recently, Tristan Harris. Got a lot of attention by, by saying that attention was being engineered into apps. If you look at the scientific literature or the contemplative [00:24:00] traditions, people can train their attention. They just aren't taught.
And then the second, I won't go through all of them, but the second one was what I call crap detection after Ernest Hemingway's remark. How can you tell the difference between good information, bad information, disinformation, and misinformation online? Unfortunately, people have become so credulous and the machinery for manufacturing fake stuff that looks real has become so sophisticated that we're kind of losing that battle online.
People are believing things that aren't true. Fortunately, this is an education problem. It's not one that requires building expensive infrastructure. Unfortunately, educational institutions are slow to change. So we're not really seeing mindfulness education where it belongs, which is really in elementary school, before kids get online.
Amy: Well, it's creeping in. They had yoga class in third grade in my daughter's elementary school. So, yeah. [00:25:00] It's creeping in there, but yeah, it's such a, it's such a good point. So you have been pretty consistently 10 years ahead. Tell me what you're seeing and paying attention to right now, given that background, what larger scale trends are you're following whose work are you being inspired by, or maybe even frightened by?
Where's your attention these days?
Howard: Oh, boy. Well, my attention is always all over the place, and that's sort of the privilege I sought by becoming a freelance writer to be able to think about a lot of things. So I taught college students at UC Berkeley and at Stanford for 10 years. I taught courses on digital journalism, social media literacy, social media issues.
And one thing that I learned was that the advent of the web and social media has radically changed the kind of monopoly that educational institutions have had. You had to go to the lecture, or get [00:26:00] somebody's lecture notes. Nowadays, you can put your lecture on YouTube, and many teachers do. The question you have to ask in the classroom is, why do we go to all the trouble of gathering physically in the same place at the same time if the lecture could be on YouTube?
What are we going to do together, face-to-face? And, you know, some people call that the flipped classroom these days, where, where you put your lectures online and then you spend your, your time together problem solving. I think the, the interesting thing about being together in a classroom is that humans are so attuned to social learning and we're so attuned to each other.
We're interesting creatures to each other, and we we give off a lot of information face-to-face that we don't online. And I got to the point of understanding that although I know my subject matter, and I could tell the students. what it is. They learn better if I can set them to figuring it out [00:27:00] for themselves cooperatively.
And that's a couple of paradigm shifts there. One is going from the kind of the teacher knows all and broadcasts to the, the teacher as a facilitator of social learning of, learning together. And the other change is from a kind of very competitive model. Cooperation in schools is still considered cheating.
Students are on their own. They are banking their own knowledge and they're competing against each other. That's not really how humans got to where we are. The whole thing about social learning is that when someone learns something, they can pass it along pretty quickly. So what I started doing was calling it co learning and calling my students co-learners and explicitly framing the course before they joined.
They would have to apply to the class, and I would explain to them that this is a class in which we teach each other. You need to get to [00:28:00] know people. I mean, you can't do this with 300 students in a classroom. Let's say you've got a seminar of 12 to 20 students. If you get to know what each other are interested in, you can not only collaborate on learning things and solving problems, but you can cooperate in helping each other learn what interests you.
Ultimately, I got to the point of asking my students to co teach with me. So they broke up into teams of two or three, and they would come up with a plan. I taught a three hour course, and so they were responsible for an hour of that course, and we would develop the plan together and there. assignment was not to try to cover everything in the syllabus that week, but to try to get people engaged as much as possible in what they felt was important.
And somehow or another, when you begin to take more responsibility for your learning, instead of the teacher's there, teacher's responsible for conveying it, you're responsible for memorizing it, then it gets exciting. Uh, it really can [00:29:00] ignite a kind of excitement I didn't know at the beginning how well this would work, but once it started working, I was able to say to the students at the beginning, the co learning can be magical.
I can't guarantee that the magic can happen. I can't make it happen just by facilitating it. You have to help, but it does happen. And the students project so much authority. On the teacher that when you thwarted authoritatively say we can cooperate, we can learn cooperatively rather than competitively, they begin to believe that.
And then they get excited about it. It's no longer just about what's on the test. It's about what is it about the subject matter that engages me. Now, this is all about teaching in a classroom, but one of the things that happened in those 10 years is that the monopoly that schools have had forever on most learning, Um, has been cracked.
It's been [00:30:00] broken. Now, certainly there always have been autodidacts who can teach themselves, but nowadays, I guarantee you, ask a 14 year old, how do you learn to play the ukulele or configure a web server? And I bet they're going to say, well, I'll go search on YouTube. And they will find another 14 year old who will show them how to do that.
I got interested in this in 2011. I got interested in the question, what if we could eliminate the teacher? What if a group of people want to learn something and none of them is the expert in that field? How would they go about finding resources and qualifying those resources and organizing them? What media would they use?
What, what learning activities would they use? How would they assess it? I called for volunteers and it was, it was quite amazing. A group of people From around the world, came together online, and we were sort of, we're, we're, um, we were an example of what we call peeragogy. We figured out among ourselves how to do it, and in [00:31:00] fact, the community created a peeragogy handbook.
If you go to peeragogy, peeragogy.org, You will get a handbook that's a free PDF, or you could, you could order a 10 printed version of it. So looking ahead, I think that the literacy about how do, how do you learn online without a school? I think we're just beginning to see that. And the fact that schools are brittle and slow moving, In so many ways, I think is going to accelerate.
Certainly it's not going to be everybody, but it's going to accelerate the number of people who take advantage of the tools that are available online to learn, learn together. So I think that's the most exciting thing. The other exciting thing is this critical uncertainty. Maybe this idea of teaching online literacy will catch on, and there's a certain percentage of people online who have a clue about attention and crap detection [00:32:00] and collaboration and participation, that we will improve the comments rather than see it deteriorate.
I'm often accused of being optimistic, but I'm really not optimistic. I'm hopeful, and that's, that's a choice. I think if enough of us Make that choice. Then we can shape the web just as we did when it, when it started.
Amy: That's awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today, Howard. This is mind blowing and very full circle kind of discussion.
And I look forward to delving even deeper into these and future discussions. Thanks for your time.
Howard: Great. This has been fun. Good to talk with you.
Intro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com, for more great resources and podcast [00:33:00] episodes.