AfterTV

Dave Winer

Dave Winer: "I wanted to live a brilliant life..."

Often controversial but always provocative, Dave Winer is one of the individuals that through skill and personality make the Web work. His work, like many influential programmers, supports the content of the Web.

From Frontier to RadioUserland to RSS to Podcasting, Dave Winer’s had a hand in it all. Inventing most of it and improving all of it. At the same time, his irrascible personality has given him the reputation of one who “does not play well with others.” Winer makes no apologies. And after all, if you are hearing this podcast or reading a blog or RSS feeds of any flavor, it is in a large measure because Winer thought it would be “a good idea” and made it happen. He’ll fill you in daily on more ideas at what may be the “original blog,” Scripting News.

LISTEN TO ANDREW KEEN AND DAVE WINER

Andrew Keen: Welcome to After TV, the show about technology and culture and media, and today we are with one of the great personalities in technology, culture, and media--a fellow called Dave Winer. We’re here in Berkeley at the Himalayan Restaurant on Shattuck Avenue and Dave is going to tell us who he is or who he isn't. Hi Dave; thanks for appearing on After TV.

Dave Winer: I’m not going to be a personality today. I’m going to be very quiet. You’re going to have to get--you’re going to have to prompt me with every question--ask me leading questions. I’m going to be--I’m difficult; that’s who I am.

Andrew Keen: Dave has never been difficult--not when I’ve known him. Anyway so Dave, before the interview I asked you who you were and you got a bit annoyed.

Dave Winer: Well because--no, I didn’t get annoyed; you asked me if I--you didn’t let me finish.

Andrew Keen: Okay; well I’ll let you finish now.

Dave Winer: That’s annoying, okay; I mean you asked if I was an engineer or what else did you ask? I don’t know; yes, I’m an engineer. I invent stuff; I’m a writer; I am a media hacker actually--is the title. I sort of got to like--meaning that you know I’m a software guy by necessity because the things I want to do involve creating software and so I learned how to you know--I mean I have a Masters in Computer Science and you know I developed lots of award-winning software, so probably that’s the thing that I’m most capable at you know. But I’ve also become a pretty good writer. I’ve been doing that for over 10 years now; so--.

Andrew Keen: How did you get into it in the first place--into inventing?

Dave Winer: I always wanted to create stuff. I--it’s just something I always wanted to do.

Andrew Keen: What--as a child?

Dave Winer: Yeah.

Andrew Keen: And what does that feel like--to want to invent stuff?

Dave Winer: I don’t know; probably it some kind of personality disorder [Laughs]. It probably had to do with not getting my parents’ approval and figuring that--that was a pretty good trick--a pretty good way to get them to approve of me--or just to be brilliant you know. Being a first-born Jewish boy is kind of like training for--it’s like brilliance school in a way [Laughs]. You’re supposed to be brilliant and it’s kind of expected of you and you know the--and whatever. So I always felt though that I wanted to live a brilliant life you know and I sort of figured why bother living if you’re not going to try to like do something wonderful with your life. So that was a young--I remember having a feeling--I remember talking to my dad about that actually when I was pretty young.

Andrew Keen: Where did you grow up?

Dave Winer: In New York City.

Andrew Keen: And what--what was his reaction when you told him you wanted to be brilliant?

Dave Winer: He wasn’t into it. [Laughs] My dad wasn’t into it.

Andrew Keen: He wasn’t into being brilliant?

Dave Winer: No.

Andrew Keen: What was he into?

Dave Winer: He loved having a job. He was--he’s a refugee, a first generation American. My parents were born in Europe; they’re Jewish. They fled you know from Hitler during the War. A lot of my family was killed in the War and so for them their values are it’s pretty wonderful to have a job, and so both of my parents had jobs their whole lives and they would freak out when they saw the path I was taking which was one that was not focused on getting a job. And for many years I didn’t have one and my parents really didn’t accept me. So my dad kind of thought it was a silly idea; he said really the thing that you want to do is get a job and I don’t think that he’s wrong. I think that actually--you know there would be a lot of advantages to having gotten a job. [Laughs] But I can honestly say that I’ve only had a job for six months in my adult life.

Andrew Keen: You had a job and what was that?

Dave Winer: I worked at a timesharing company in New York named Rapid Data. I was a tech, the tech guy working on the tech sales team and we serviced a couple of big accounts and I actually made quite a bit of money and in just a few months and then decided to go back to school.

Andrew Keen: So when you say you wanted to be brilliant you could have been brilliant in lots of fields; I mean you could have chosen to be a brilliant doctor or a brilliant historian.

Dave Winer: Yes.

Andrew Keen: What drew you to the tech--were you always drawn to technology?

Dave Winer: No; it was like the most improbable thing for me to do. I hated computers when I was in high school; I hated them from the political standpoint. I thought they were bad.

Andrew Keen: In what way?

Dave Winer: They were part of--you know I grew up in the ‘60s, so you know for me the--from that timeframe computers were part of the military and they were you know--they were bad things, you know. And but I--ultimately I decided that I would go that way, first of all because I found that I had a real aptitude for it. I just--I took a class and I was a math major undergrad which was also just a ridiculous choice for me. I think that--like a lot of kids do--make stupid choices in life because just do the most ridiculous thing you can imagine doing, you know. This is the most ridiculous thing I could do.

Andrew Keen: Why was that ridiculous though?

Dave Winer: Because I had no aptitude from--. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen: But you were--

Dave Winer: I really didn’t have any aptitude particularly; what I did have aptitude for and why it turned out to be a particularly good decision was I had incredible aptitude into computers. I understood how computers worked before anybody taught me the first thing about computers and so for me learning how to program was like a homecoming at a--a sort of very--you know basic level. I was discovering something very important about myself; this really worked for me. I really understood it, and I found I understood it better than pretty--pretty much anybody else around me. And so I followed it because I--first of all I thought it was ridiculous for a different reason that I could get a degree doing this was--I thought this is silly. I mean getting degrees is supposed to be hard. And this wasn’t hard. Actually though for a lot of other people too, programming is fun; it’s like puzzles. Like I like crossword puzzles; nobody pays me to do a crossword puzzle right. I mean but I--I love crossword puzzles but I hate Scrabble--period. There’s an interesting--something interesting in that; I don’t know what it is but I don’t like Scrabble but I do like crossword puzzles.

Andrew Keen: Was there like a moment that you realized that this was amazing or did it just happen?

Dave Winer: Yeah; there was a moment when I knew this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

Andrew Keen: Do you want to talk about it?

Dave Winer: No; that’s the moment. [Laughs] That’s it.

Andrew Keen: But I mean where were you? Were you on campus, were you in front of a computer; did you just suddenly realize it?

Dave Winer: I don’t remember where I was. I just remember having the--I just remember knowing at some point not too far into it that this is what I was going to do. One of the reasons why--actually there was a logical reason to choose this also--not just that I had aptitude for it but also because the barriers to creativity were so incredibly low. Whereas you know if you wanted to rise to the top I might have--actually I probably wouldn’t have risen to the top in any established professions, just simply because of the way I--people react to me. I don’t rise to organizations; I create organizations, I create structures, and with--and so like I was at the top of them from the day they existed so that’s how I’ve become influential. Had I had to rise through, I don’t take tests well; I don’t--I’m not easily managed, you know--all those sorts of things that help somebody become the best reporter or the best doctor or the best whatever are not things that I have. So it was probably a pretty good idea to pick something where there was no ladder basically and the ladder needed to get created still. So you know--that’s why it was a good choice and why it worked out reasonably well.

Andrew Keen: I’ve always understood that--and I’m not a mathematician; I’ve always understood that mathematicians tend to peak earlier and spend the rest of their lives in kind of intellectual decline. Do programmers age well intellectually?

Dave Winer: Well it’s not--it’s way too early to have an opinion about that because we waste too much of the value of a programmer; we don’t respect them well enough to even begin to understand what makes somebody a good programmer versus not. You know I think it is probably true to some extent, like everything that your skills and talents--I’m 51 years old, you know. I don’t push myself anywhere near as hard as I used to but that’s because I don’t take the drugs I used to take either. So I mean, you know it’s like [Laughs] I mean there’s a--you know your body does change but on the other hand I mean we don’t respect programmers at all, so how you can possibly tell--? I mean you know we have a basic respect for baseball players okay; so we take their batting averages and we have competitions were we figure out who’s the better baseball player based on a certain set of criteria. We don’t have anything like that for programmers. In fact, you know we haven’t gotten to the point yet where we even like acknowledge that--that was a particularly good piece of work or where we even archive or note innovation in programming. For example, we’ve thrown out like a huge amount of know-how over the last 20 years; we’ve just lost it--completely lost it. I think we’d do better if we looked at that--sort of figure out why do we do that? Why do we like throw all this great stuff out so frequently, you know? We don’t maintain it; we don’t keep it. We don’t honor the people who create this stuff, so I don’t know. I mean yeah, you’re probably right but in all practical purposes I’m every bit as productive today as I was--. I mean here, look at it this way; I invented or created this whole programming environment called Frontier, right? I did that with enormous amounts of young person time, okay. Well nobody--hardly anybody uses the damn thing; so was there any effective development going on there? Whereas RSS which I put a very small amount of time into developing, I mean relatively speaking, tiny little amount of time has had huge impact on the world. So which matters more?

Andrew Keen: That’s an interesting question.

Dave Winer: I think it kind of matters more that the tiny little bit of work has had much better--greater influence. Now is the work that I did on Frontier per hour any less valuable--no; it’s every bit as valuable. There’s a lot of breakthrough ideas in there; people just simply don’t want to look at it because they’ve got this idea, okay well that’s not something Dave does. You know whatever--for the lunacy of the world we live in you know a lot of stuff gets thrown away. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. Does that answer your question?

Andrew Keen: I think so. I mean do--I guess the young people always must ask you the same questions. I mean when you’re--when you’re thinking up new programming ideas are you thinking is that sort of--is that aesthetically exciting and intellectually exciting?

Dave Winer: Sure, oh yeah.

Andrew Keen: Is this going to be useful because the RSS thing, I mean you know you’re--

Dave Winer: Both; you can't be one without the other. In other words, the aesthetics are all about the utility.

Andrew Keen: So what went wrong with Frontier? Why didn’t people use it?

Dave Winer: Oh a lot of things went wrong--a lot; I mean I don’t think your listeners care particularly why--

Andrew Keen: Well you know--

Dave Winer: I mean you know it’s like you know I don’t want to go--I mean folks thinking of the negative and I don’t really want to do that.

Andrew Keen: Right; but I mean presumably there’s sort of a lot involved and you’ve got to have a few shots at something for something really to happen.

Dave Winer: Yeah; oh yeah a lot of luck and a different kind of know-how too. I mean the kind of know-how that comes with being in your 40s or 50s makes it possible to manage the politics to get something like RSS going. It’s probably not something I could have done when I was in my 20s because I didn’t know how to listen very well. And I didn’t understand what the valuable relationships were and how to get other people to move. What kinds of things matter to other people? So in the case of RSS there was a ton of value in getting the New York Times to implement RSS even though--and I want to qualify it; I wanted them to do it because I wanted their content. I’m avid reader of the New York Times. But that--that would influence a lot of bloggers is kind of almost counter-intuitive because people would think okay, bloggers are perhaps--they’d buy anything by other bloggers but they--you know sort of like what we called in the ‘80s the Nikon camera effect--is that professional tools sold to amateurs because amateurs wanted the best tools in case they happened to have a brilliant moment when the perfect shot showed up in front of their camera. They wanted the Nikon; so that they could win the Pulitzer [Laughs] and they didn’t want to be stuck with the [brownie] you know for a lack of having a really good camera; why lose the great picture right. So everybody would want to use the thing that the professionals used; so it turned out to make a big difference. There were a lot of things that made a big difference that had nothing whatsoever to do with programming--had everything to do with people.

Andrew Keen: And RSS from my own technical perspective seems so simple.

Dave Winer: Yeah.

Andrew Keen: It seems so elegant; do you want to you know very briefly for our listeners--perhaps you don’t know what it is. Could you describe it?

Dave Winer: I suppose. It’s a way of transmitting news information in the way a computer can read it and then other--and then the software can sort of take a whole bunch of these RSS feeds is what they’re called and sort of pick the new stuff out and just show you the new stuff. So you--sort of like automated web surfing; take something that you know if you--if you didn’t think--if you thought you could use more information from the web RSS is a way of getting you more information, squeezing more currency out of it. I don’t know if that helps.

Andrew Keen: And RSS is the sort of--is the foundation for blogs; is that fair?

Dave Winer: Well it’s certainly one of them.

Andrew Keen: Right.

Dave Winer: But it’s every--as I said it’s the--just as much the foundation for newspapers as it is for blogs.

Andrew Keen: So--

Dave Winer: These papers changed--if you didn’t notice they changed in the last 10 years. RSS is how they changed; I mean--.

Andrew Keen: So rather than sort of pulling it’s pushing; is that fair to put it very viably?

Dave Winer: No, yeah--not really but [Laughs]--no, because I mean you want the honest answer--no; it’s not. I mean it’s just providing it in a way that a computer can assist you in the surfing and the computer can view it automatically--do automatically for you what you were doing manually which is the trick of computers. That’s what computers do for you is they take things that were--that you were doing manually and do it for your automatically.

Andrew Keen: And I think what RSS has done for the average computer user has made being on a computer a more productive richer experience.

Dave Winer: Richer I would say; I don’t know about more productive. I mean it’s not necessarily about productivity. You know being more informed about the world that you live in or having the capacity of being more informed might be more accurate. It has value in its own right whether it’s productivity or not--it’s kind of hard to say.

Andrew Keen: Well you must be pretty pleased that you--you’ve--you were one of the guys who came up with a program that has made the experience on the Internet be richer.

Dave Winer: Sure.

Andrew Keen: I mean that’s what a programmer as you say lives for--is to change things.

Dave Winer: I don’t know; oh I don’t know about that. You see changing the world is not one of the things I want to do. I mean but certainly making the--making things work better is something I do want to do; that’s fine. I think that it’s you know--and there’s maybe a subtle difference but I’m not one of those guys who thinks I know how to change the world.

Andrew Keen: What are you working on now?

Dave Winer: Right at this minute? [Laughs] I don’t know. I just got through doing a conference called Blogger [Conference], which your publisher didn’t like.

Andrew Keen: Why didn’t he like it; do you remember?

Dave Winer: He’d have to ask him. He has certain personality flaws basically; it was a perfectly lovely conference. Everybody that was there thought it was great.

Andrew Keen: And this is Roger Simon. What did he say about it; do you remember?

Dave Winer: I don’t remember; you’d have to ask him. But this is my way of saying hello to him and saying I agreed to do the interview despite the fact that you work for an uninformed person. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen: Well if he fires me now you’ll have to employ me, Dave.

Dave Winer: I don’t have to do anything. [Laughs] Are you kidding? What am I doing now? What we’re doing is at this moment working on sort of bringing pod-casting back to the people. Pod-casting is another thing that I invented and it’s an outgrowth of the work that I do with RSS and there has been this weird idea that it needed to be Silicon Valley(ized) and that means owned--turned into user-generated content and all that’s run its course and they’ve all pretty much failed to do that. And so now we’re going back to creating sort of a community directory that allows you know the same idea that the big media and individuals share a platform for promoting their work and it’s going great. Everybody wants to do it and so that’s what I’m doing this week. And I thought we were going to talk about politics too.

Andrew Keen: Yeah; well let’s definitely talk about politics.

Dave Winer: Yeah; because you know I’m active politically and I think all this stuff has a political dimension you know and that’s something I--I am going to do in the upcoming election--the 2008 election; the context in which I do it is still up for grabs; but--.

Andrew Keen: What do you think that could involve?

Dave Winer: Well I think it’s pretty simple; I mean I was in--at Harvard at Berkman Center during the 2004 Primary Campaign and got peripherally involved with the Dean Campaign. I wasn’t a supporter of Howard Dean but I did get involved in their use of technology and understood what they were doing and I--you know everybody sort of assumes that the Internet is going to play a role in the 2008 election, and of course it is going to play a role and every--all of the political candidates are trying to figure out how to be as much of a breakthrough as Dean was in 2004. And I think the answer there is going to be not so--it’s not going to be in candidates’ blogging which is what sort of knee-jerk reaction--every time this subject--I did a conference in 2003 about this and we had all the bloggers from all the campaigns there and we had regular bloggers there and all they--anybody could come up with was well the candidates need to blog or--and then they--John Edwards was at this conference I was at a few weeks ago and they all said well you have to blog yourself and you have to let bloggers on the bus and you have to have bloggers go with you everywhere you go except in your bedroom. And it’s like [Laughs]--and the horrible thought of course is that of course Edwards could pull that off. I mean you know he is such an incredibly good actor that he could appear to be spontaneous yet stay on message and even while he’s taking a dump you know. [Laughs] But--and that’s not the answer; I mean you know more acting, more--more push as you say, you know where they view the Internet as just another advertising medium is nothing revolutionary interesting--even interesting about it. However, if politicians were to start to read the blogs and understand and listen to them and pick up good ideas from them and then add their value which is--and this is what they’re supposed to do is learn how--they know how to make the political system do things for people. So now connect the bloggers up to that and you might have something. A good example of that was Hillary Clinton is promoting this idea of--that the Congress-people don’t get raises until the minimum wage is raised, which is an interesting idea and that came from bloggers. So the ideas that--it’s a two-way medium, which means you don’t just write for it; you have to read it too. And so that--the candidate that figures out how to do that--how to distribute the--the insight and of course there’s a lot of crap in the blog(isphere) too and you have to sort through all that too--is that finally great stuff on the blog(isphere) and then route that through the political system--that’s something and that would be worth doing.

Andrew Keen: Is that a technology challenge or is that just some theorist political figure sitting down and reading the blogs?

Dave Winer: All of it is not a technology challenge. Almost none of this has any heavy-duty technology to it. So the answer is no; it’s--it is a human challenge. Yeah; I mean blogging is very lightweight technology, Andrew; it’s not heavy technology. None of this is about technology.

Andrew Keen: Why do you think then it seems so much to ask for politicians to actually read what we all think?

Dave Winer: Because that’s the inversion of the system; that’s--that really does--it’s the same reason why a reporter at the New York Times who has risen up at the top of their field doesn’t want to all of the sudden start you know competing with bloggers because he worked so hard to get to the top of his ladder in that system, he doesn’t want to hear about the system changing. The system isn't built around politicians listening to those constituencies. It’s the other way around; we’re supposed to listen to them, right and of course what they’ve discovered is that if they actually say anything we won't vote for them. So it’s all about doing nothing. [Laughs] I don’t know; so it’s--that really is change, right.

Andrew Keen: Do you think Dean listened in 2004?

Dave Winer: I’m sorry?

Andrew Keen: Do you think Dean was listening?

Dave Winer: Absolutely not, no; no, no, Dean was the failure on the Internet. Dean used the Internet to raise money and that was it. He didn’t even spend any appreciable amount of money on the Internet; he took money out of the Internet and used it to buy TV ads, which is an insult to the Internet.

Andrew Keen: Have you come across any politicians local who might be doing what you’re suggesting?

Dave Winer: Nope, nope, but there should be.

Andrew Keen: So what is it--does it have to have an anti-politician?

Dave Winer: No; I don’t think so. I think that this is an evolutionary process. Eventually you’ll have what--I mean I like that idea of an anti-politician. I mean that sort of goes back though to the framework of the Constitution of the United States. They didn’t envision anything like a politician; they envisioned the citizens--us governing ourselves--self-government, right. So you know it’s not so much a new idea as it is going back to an old idea. And ultimately the--there will be continual upheaval until we get back to that because the whole theme of the Internet everywhere and this is not technological--is disintermediation--is that it takes out the intermediary and so the politicians had better start doing their job which is to facilitate the interests of their constituency and even at that they’re going to have a struggle to survive in the new context. But at least they--those individuals have a fighting chance. But if they continue to play the--I mean the--the current system is just--it’s all based around what a few big media moguls want; in other words they’ll give you coverage and with that coverage you can raise money which you then turn around and give back to them. That’s their little system; that’s how it works. That system is breaking and soon will break.

Andrew Keen: Do you have any sort of figures in history who you admire politically--I mean Martin Luther King, Gandhi, someone who really did sort of achieve some of these things?

Dave Winer: I don’t think in those terms. I’ll have to think about that. I don’t think about historical political figures; I’m sure there are plenty that are admirable but I don’t have an answer for you right off the top of my head.

Andrew Keen: So what you’re imagining, what would be good is something that has happened before?

Dave Winer: I didn’t say that; I meant what I said.

Andrew Keen: Right.

Dave Winer: I’m not one of those guys that tells you different answers from what I actually think.

Andrew Keen: But you did talk about sort of early American history.

Dave Winer: Sure, yeah; I admire what they did. I don’t know how they did it. I also know enough about how history gets created to know that we probably don’t really know what they thought. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen: Right; but it sounds like--

Dave Winer: And what the--each individual actually did. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen: But it sounds like what you’re sort of saying was suddenly that some of the--at least some of the anti-federalists in the debate around the Constitution--and I’m not saying you are an anti-federalist or anything like that--

Dave Winer: I’m also--I’m just an observer really, okay; in other words I study the Internet and I understand how the Internet works and I’m a product like all of us of the 20^th Century and the mono-culture in every aspect of what we did. The only people who created that mattered in the 20^th Century were the absolute best at each thing and nobody else was--had a license to create or nobody else really was permitted to create. And now we’re in a different world where creativity is something that’s more broadly distributed. So all I do is just study that and come to my conclusions about it; it’s not based on anything that I want particularly you know. For all I know centralized government might be the answer to all of our problems but that’s not what we’re getting. What we’re going towards is decentralization now because that’s what--because the new technology and--and it’s not about the technology per se but it’s about what it--its influence on our culture is. The new technology is about decentralization; that’s what it does to us.

Andrew Keen: And de-professionalization if there’s such a word?

Dave Winer: Sure; absolutely--amateur(ization)--there is nothing wrong with amateur by the way. All the good things that happen in our world were started by amateurs. They don’t get professional until later in their lives; so--.

Andrew Keen: What does--could you give me an example of that?

Dave Winer: Baseball--I’ve been studying that; baseball completely started as an amateur thing. In fact the rule for the first 20 or 30 years of baseball was that you were not allowed to make money playing baseball. And I’ve found it fascinating. Look at everything--anything that’s ever been done that’s any creative endeavor always started out as an amateur thing because when they start nobody is willing to pay for it.

Andrew Keen: So amateur meaning--in defining terms you don’t get paid for it?

Dave Winer: Well sure, absolutely; you do it for love.

Andrew Keen: It’s just for passion?

Dave Winer: For love--that’s the root of the word. Ama--is love.

Andrew Keen: So would you agree that you’re a little bit of a romantic or not about that?

Dave Winer: No; I--no, Andrew; I’m sorry. [Laughs] Why?

Andrew Keen: Well it’s--and I don’t--

Dave Winer: I have no idea what that means; I don’t like labels.

Andrew Keen: You don’t like labels. Well you--

Dave Winer: You can say whatever you want. I’m not going to say that about myself.

Andrew Keen: Okay; but it’s--

Dave Winer: [Laughs]

Andrew Keen: --no, it’s an attractive ideal.

Dave Winer: Thank you.

Andrew Keen: Everyone doing what they love and somehow figuring out a way that they get paid for it.

Dave Winer: No, but it’s--no, no; you see that--that’s the whole thing that amateurs don’t get paid for it. Once you get paid for it you’re not an amateur anymore.

Andrew Keen: So how could that world work then?

Dave Winer: Sure; a lot of things you do you don’t get paid for. I’m not getting paid to talk to you right now. But I’m doing it anyway; I’m going to eat lunch right after we finish and not only am I not getting paid to eat lunch, I’m actually going to pay to eat lunch--if you can believe that. I mean money--I don’t get paid for almost anything I do; I get paid for a very small portion of what I do. And I’m not that unusual. If you really stop and look and see what your life is about and how much of your time is spent doing things that you get paid for and things that you--versus things that you don’t get paid for you’ll see that there is an awful lot of your time you spend doing things you don’t get paid for.

Andrew Keen: Right; and I--I agree. I mean--it’s a very--it’s a very attractive notion of all of us doing--spending as much time as we can on things we love. I mean that--and when I used the word romantic I meant that in a positive sense; I didn’t mean it critically.

Dave Winer: Maybe I do things out of a need for--an obsessive need, a compulsion; maybe it’s not romantic. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen: Right.

Dave Winer: It’s still an amateur though. It’s still an amateur if I do it and I’m not getting paid. That’s why I didn’t want to like say it because that’s self-aggrandizement and I’m not into that, you know; but you know--you can say it if you want to but it’s not something I’m inclined to say.

Andrew Keen: But--but amateur is an ideal--something that’s sort of attracting?

Dave Winer: No; the amateur is what we’re doing.

Andrew Keen: Are you an amateur writer?

Dave Winer: Of course; I’ve gotten paid once or twice. I mean I used to be a contributing editor at Wired, that--their online--Hot Wired was part of Wired Magazine and I got paid what was it like $500 a column or something like that.

Andrew Keen: Was it bad?

Dave Winer: No; but that was really not putting too much food on the table to be honest with you. [Laughs] My server bills were like $2,000 a month okay to give you a rough idea of what I was spending to create the $500 a month--a column you know and it wasn’t--it wasn’t about the money but--and other than that I’ve never been paid to write.

Andrew Keen: Have you ever thought of doing a book?

Dave Winer: Sure.

Andrew Keen: Well Dave, I want to thank you; this has been very entertaining. I want to free you up to have your lunch and I want to have you back on After TV to talk more because you’re a great interview. Thank you very much.

Dave Winer: Thank you.

Narrator: Thanks for listening to After TV, which is hosted and distributed by www.pajamasmedia.com, featuring music by Unity, an artist licensed by Creative Commons. Hope you can join us again.

Esther Dyson

Entrepreneur, venture capitalist, publisher, author, and central Net presence for nearly two decades, Esther Dyson  ( Release 1.0 ) always seems to know where the Web is and where it is going next. In this exclusive interview she talks about the once and future Internet with Andrew Keen.

LISTEN TO KEEN AND DYSON

Andrew Keen: Welcome to After TV, the show about media technology and culture. Today we are talking with Esther Dyson, a very well known technology visionary. She is with C-Net Networks and she’s the Editor of Release 1.0.

Esther Dyson: Hi.

Andrew Keen: Thanks Esther for appearing on After TV.

Esther Dyson: My pleasure, but I’m not just a--I’m not so much a visionary as a skeptic I would say.

Andrew Keen: Well I brought up Esther up to the hills of Berkeley so she can look over the whole Bay Area and at least try and be a visionary. What I want Esther to talk about today is technology over the next few years, particularly the next 10 years. Esther was involved in a very interesting online newspaper debate with [Vin Cerf] of Google Networks about the future of technology. One of the things you said Esther was that the Internet will have more ubiquity, will be less-visible; what did you mean by that?

Esther Dyson: I meant that it will be everywhere but you won't see it because you will take it for granted. It’s like electricity; you almost--except maybe on the porch of the Claremont overlooking San Francisco--you expect it to be everywhere but you don’t really notice it. You just take it for granted. So you expect this table to be plugged in so that for example I could get a reading of whether someone had left an item on the table, you expect your swimming pool to be wired so that you can find out what the temperature is, you expect your kid to have a chip somewhere so that you can make sure he gets on the bus, you expect the bus to have a chip so you can make sure you know when the bus is coming; the Internet is not going to be just more ubiquitous but it’s going to be more physical. We’ve sort of built out the virtual Internet and now we’re extending the Internet to kind of lay it over the whole physical world.

Andrew Keen: In his forward to Amusing Ourselves to Death, the techno-skeptic, Neil Postman made the comparison between George Orwell and Aldous Huxley imagining the future of technology either as 1984’s Brave New World; is your vision one of those? Are you really that skeptical? What does this mean to have technology that you can't see but is everywhere?

Esther Dyson: You know the world--not only is the future not evenly distributed, [but] shaped--I think Bruce Sterling--maybe [William] Gibson, but it’s also not even; so you may have repression in one place and you may have Aldous Huxley in one place and Orwell in another. You--geography still matters. As long as someone can burst into your house and arrest you physically it’s not the same being in China as being in the US. So I think some of the world is going to be like Orwell or like this movie I just saw, V for Vendetta; some other of it is--it’s really not a question of technology. It’s a question--what we allow our government to do or of the government we elect and in most places people elect their government. In many places I would say they elect the wrong government but that’s not their judgment; that’s my judgment.

Andrew Keen: But let’s take America first since we’re here; how is this going to impact this invisible but ubiquitous technology on American politics and on society?

Esther Dyson: Well it’s still really not clear yet. I think--I don’t think the next election will decide everything but we’re definitely tending in the direction of much more surveillance, much more control; if we allow that to continue it’s much easier for the government to survey and control because they have all this technology at their hands.

Andrew Keen: This is the Orwell scenario--is it?

Esther Dyson: Yeah; and I mean Huxley as well. The thing is that in Huxley they were happy about it. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen: Right. [Laughs]

Esther Dyson: So--

Andrew Keen: Well they were drugged, so they were taking happy pills.

Esther Dyson: Yeah; well you see I think the real technology news in the next 20 years is probably much more about bio-tech and performance drugs including happiness as a performance, i.e. if you’re happy you can perform better, so let’s put you on Prozac so that you don’t feel crummy when you’ve screwed up. And I mean personally I think feeling crummy when you’ve screwed up is a very good feedback mechanism.

Andrew Keen: Although on your email you have your--your tag-line is what--make mistakes?

Esther Dyson: Always make new mistakes; don’t make the same old ones.

Andrew Keen: Oh new mistakes [Laughs] and that doesn’t make you feel bad.

Esther Dyson: No; it should make you feel bad and that’s why you make a new one instead of the old one.

Andrew Keen: So it’s good to feel bad that you go onto make--

Esther Dyson: It’s like so many things; it’s good to feel bad if it provokes the proper response which is to make a different mistake next time. It’s not good to feel bad just in general. On the other hand, a lot of Americans, not only do they feel unhappy but they feel that they’re inadequate because they feel unhappy. If you were in objectively unpleasant circumstances you should feel unhappy and it’s like desensitizing ourselves to pain is not good. Eliminating pain that has no purpose is good; so it’s like everything else. You need to judge when it’s correct to do something and when it’s not. That’s what--that’s what being a grownup is; it means making judgments, making ethical judgments saying this is enough; that is too much.

Andrew Keen: As we drift towards Orwell and Huxley and you--

Esther Dyson: I don’t mean to be quite so bleak. It’s just--

Andrew Keen: Well as we drift towards elements or shades or potential--

Esther Dyson: Yeah; right.

Andrew Keen: --of Orwell and Huxley, do you feel you as one of the most sort of articulate and loud I guess visionaries--technology visionaries over the last generation--do you feel you’ve made a mistake? Do you feel that where--that this ubiquitous world of technology is actually something that we now need to be very careful and critical of?

Esther Dyson: No; I mean yes, we need to be careful and critical of it. No; I don’t think I made a mistake--a big mistake.

Andrew Keen: So you don’t feel bad?

Esther Dyson: No; I mean I’ve always tried to get people to think more about the implications of all this stuff.

Andrew Keen: Right.

Esther Dyson: And by and large it’s good; you can't--I was in India last week and you see people getting cell phones, becoming empowered and able to make payments to find out what’s going on; it’s--this stuff is good. It can be misused--badly misused. The problem though is human nature; it’s not technology.

Andrew Keen: Right; so let me come back to the politics of this. Are you more fearful in terms of this aggregation of information? Are you fearful that the government will misuse it or companies like say Google will misuse it?

Esther Dyson: Well I’m not worried about companies misusing it as companies. I am worried about companies giving it to the government. It’s the government that has power. I mean Google can sell me stuff and they have the power to reveal my information--

Andrew Keen: But Google knows a lot more about you than the government does.

Esther Dyson: Right; but Google knowing it doesn’t put me in danger. The government knowing it does; so the problem is if Google gives it to the government, but the point is the government has the power to put me in jail, the government has the power to deny me my rights. Google does not. That doesn’t mean that the Google information can't be dangerous in the hands of the government, but understand that it’s the power of the government that is the problem not Google’s information. And that’s a subtle distinction but it’s real.

Andrew Keen: So does the responsibility of the tech community and of spokespeople like yourself to convince Google of the importance of maintaining the source of--the religiousness of information in terms of giving it away?

Esther Dyson: I think Google is pretty well aware of that.

Andrew Keen: Yeah?

Esther Dyson: It doesn’t hurt for them to be reminded.

Andrew Keen: Although they’re you know--the China story is very concerning isn't it?

Esther Dyson: Aren’t you thinking of the Yahoo China story?

Andrew Keen: Well and the Google in terms of the way in which Google--

Esther Dyson: But look; these are very, very different issues. Yahoo gave information about one of its subscribers to the government.

Andrew Keen: Right; and so do Microsoft, right?

Esther Dyson: Google--Microsoft--I don’t know; Google blocks information.

Andrew Keen: Right.

Esther Dyson: That’s a huge distinction; I mean you see people need to be crisp about evil just as they’re crisp about other things. Because the rule is not black and white and you need--

Andrew Keen: Right.

Esther Dyson: --just blanketing everything as bad doesn’t enable you to kick out the good to decide--again you need human judgment. Does giving more Chinese people more information, letting them see what they’re not seeing--is that good or bad? Fundamentally I think it’s good.

Andrew Keen: You mean the Google sort of censored engine in China?

Esther Dyson: Yes; I think Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and everybody else getting together to ask the US government to lobby China makes sense; though I’m not sure how much good it will do. I don’t think--you know I spend a lot of time in Russia. I see, if you like--moral issues everywhere there. I could decide not to go to Russia because by going to Russia I’m in essence condoning bribery and all this kind of stuff. But I don’t because I think you can't fix the world without getting muddy. And if you want to be completely pure you should just stay out of these things.

Andrew Keen: Stand back right.

Esther Dyson: Yeah; and I think--so I think it is important to make distinctions. I don’t think I’m sliding down a slippery slope of ethics. I think I’m in there thinking for--trying to get other people to think this belief because you need crispness and clarity in order to find what’s good, what’s bad, why it’s good, why it’s bad, what the implications are, long-term versus short-term; it’s not just shades of gray. There’s actually structure there; there is leverage points, getting more people to understand what’s wrong in their own country, getting the Chinese--. And the Chinese problem, it goes back to this always making new mistakes--the Chinese problem is the government hates to admit mistakes. But if you don’t admit your mistakes you can't fix them, so if you help the Chinese see a few mistakes and see how that admission can help them be fixed that’s tremendously powerful. It’s hard to do because they still don’t like to admit that they make mistakes, but here in the US we have another great example--Paul O’Neill, our former Treasury Secretary says we can't fix our hospitals until we start admitting we’re killing people, which is true. We’re killing people all the time but we won't admit it because of legal issues more than censorship issues. You have to go and acknowledge what’s wrong before you can fix it. That’s something that China really needs to learn. If we just blanket condemn them and don’t bother to go in there we’re not going to help.

Andrew Keen: In your Wall Street Journal piece you talked about the Internet representing a shift of power towards individuals over the next 10 years.

Esther Dyson: Right.

Andrew Keen: What does that mean?

Esther Dyson: It means that the power of institutions is constantly eroded by transparency by individuals talking back to the institutions, by individuals talking about the institutions; it means the world is more dynamic and fluid. It’s harder to grab power and hang onto it. What it also means is that--as any individual gets power that individual’s power is more subject to erosion because you become famous and then you know--[Guckert] writes about you and your personal life is transparent for everybody to see whatever--. So it’s a world where the distance between the top and the bottom--I’m not talking economically; I’m talking now in terms of power--gets eroded. There are lots of counter-forces like the government still has power to send certain surveillance and so forth and they have the power to use that information. But in general, I would say more individuals have more power now than in the past and they have more power over their own lives, less power perhaps over the lives of others, which is good as far as I’m concerned.

Andrew Keen: But how does that power manifest itself? Is--are you talking about people building up their reputations?

Esther Dyson: I’m talking about who I can communicate with, my ability to find out what’s going on, what’s available to me, what my career options are, what trains there are from Berkeley to San Francisco--the kind of stuff where 20 years ago you needed a personal assistant and a library card and a lot of time. You can now go online and find the stuff out in two minutes; that is huge power--not over other people, but over your own ability to pick what you want out of what’s available.

Andrew Keen: So it’s convenient and it saves time?

Esther Dyson: Well but it’s also--I know which hospital kills more people than another hospital; I know what this politician--who this politician was talking to last week; I know the safety record of this airline versus that airline. It’s not just convenience; it is a lot more personal knowledge and personal choice.

Andrew Keen: Aren’t you describing a very specific kind of individual?

Esther Dyson: Well not everybody benefits from this directly. A lot of benefit from it indirectly and some people you know--not everybody is happy in this world and not everybody is fulfilled--absolutely. But you have the leading edge helping to change the world for the rest of it--for the rest of the people.

Andrew Keen: And how do you think this will impact on people’s relations with each other? How does this impact on our social contract, our social pact? Does it make us more competitive?

Esther Dyson: I think--I mean the one bad thing is it probably makes us less willing to settle. Sometimes if you settle you work harder to be happy with what you’ve got. So we have more divorce; we have--relationships tend not to be as lasting. Another--we live longer; we outlast our relationships much more, so you know--yeah; there are negative sides to this and positive sides, but if you--you--I forget who it is, but you know there’s this notion of design--I think it was John [Rawls] or something--design a society in which you would want to live without knowledge of whether you would be rich or poor in that society.

Andrew Keen: Right; that’s [Rawls].

Esther Dyson: Right; so another formulation of it is pick a century in which to live if you did not know whether you would be rich or poor, and I’d certainly rather live in this century than 300 years ago.

Andrew Keen: But would you rather live in the 21^st Century or the 20^th Century in terms of being rich or poor?

Esther Dyson: Me, I’d pick the 21^st.

Andrew Keen: So you believe that--and I know that this is not just purely a technology question--

Esther Dyson: It’s totally not a technology question.

Andrew Keen: Although as technology becomes more ubiquitous and influential in shaping the way we live it does relate; you think that there will be less differences between rich and poor in the 21^st Century than the 20^th?

Esther Dyson: Not necessarily but I think even the poor will be better off. I mean I--if--it’s really--it is a really tough question and is an average good enough, or is it the median that matters? I don’t know. But I do know had I been born 300 years ago I would have been a cripple because my legs were bent when I came out of the womb and because of modern medicine I was put in casts and so I’m not--maybe I should be more politically correct--I’m not disabled. Had I been born I don’t know when it was--but 1,000 years ago I’m now probably legally blind without vision correction. And yes, I’m a very privileged person in this century but by and large I think for more people things are getting better. That doesn’t mean--it’s not just there’s not a long way to go; that doesn’t mean there aren’t horrible devastating things going on in the world right now that those of us who are lucky should be trying to correct.

Andrew Keen: What you’re saying I think is that smart people benefit from technology; they use it for their advantage; they use it--

Esther Dyson: Even dumb people do; smart people--

Andrew Keen: Give me an example of how dumb people use technology.

Esther Dyson: They use it the same way as smart people do. They get online and they find out things.

Andrew Keen: But don’t they often find out the wrong things? They go to the wrong blog, the wrong website; isn't that the problem?

Esther Dyson: I think--

Andrew Keen: I mean how would you distinguish between--I mean I think we’re getting stuck here and--

Esther Dyson: Okay; I think you’re a smart guy and I don’t think you give enough respect to people who aren’t as smart as you are. There are a lot of things people who are not in the upper deciles are unable to do to control their own--I mean just go to a shopping mall. You may be appalled at what people buy, you may think that they--but people have more choices, they have more freedom; they’re not necessarily happier [Laughs].

Andrew Keen: Right.

Esther Dyson: But it’s very elitist to say well just because these people can choose they’re choosing things I don’t approve of and therefore it’s not good.

Andrew Keen: But thinking specifically on technology and the way in which people say take--and I mean specifically about the Internet, do you think that it requires education and some sort of intellectual sensibility to be able to use the Internet properly?

Esther Dyson: No; and I mean it’s not just the Internet. First of all if you think iPods are good because people get plugged in and listen to music, you don’t need to be of above-average intelligence to use an iPod. You don’t need to be above-average--being able to read and write is really key in the modern world. If you don’t have that you’re in trouble.

Andrew Keen: Right.

Esther Dyson: But one thing I hope technology will enable us to do is to become a richer, more productive world overall so that we’ll be able to teach more people to read and write, because I mean there are some people who simply are intellectually incapable of it but almost--it’s a very small percentage. It’s a very large number of people who can't read and write because they weren't able to have the benefit of an education, and I don’t think putting a computer in a school is going to enable people to read and write. But I do think more technology is going to make society richer and more productive, so that they have enough surpluses to teach their children to read and write.

Andrew Keen: In your Journal piece you also talked about something called the attention economy, which is a hot concept at the moment. I know it’s not yours but you’re one of its--you didn’t invent it but you’re one of its champions. Do you want to describe what you mean by it?

Esther Dyson: No; I’m not a champion of it. I’m a champion of understanding the concept.

Andrew Keen: Right. [Laughs]

Esther Dyson: It’s a very different thing. The attention economy fundamentally says that the thing that is now scarce is attention. We’ve gotten--and this is this sort of upper middle class thing--we’ve got enough stuff, we’ve got enough goods, we’ve got enough--almost everything--the thing that’s in short supply is attention from other human beings. A computer cannot pay you attention. It’s this innate thing that--it’s not sex, it’s not love, it’s not food but it’s something humans crave and that’s the attention of other human beings. And in order to get that attention they buy stuff, they buy cute clothes, they try to look nicer, they blog, they put up a My Space profile and so people go online not to give attention to vendors, but to get attention for themselves in many cases. And that I think isn't well enough understood. The--sort of the misguided notion in the attention economy is that it’s about the attention consumers [carry] to products. But the real attention economy is about the economy of the interaction between people--people’s desire for attention, people’s desire to have fans--the guy who explained all this best is Michael Goldhaber.

Andrew Keen: Right, who has been on this show.

Esther Dyson: Oh good. Okay; then you’ve covered that, so--.

Andrew Keen: So it’s not really an economy; it’s more of a--

Esther Dyson: No; it’s an economy.

Andrew Keen: Well it’s more of a sort of an existential struggle almost for recognition?

Esther Dyson: Well that’s the--there is a struggle but there’s also an economy where attention is traded, where attention is scarce, where people try to amass attention; that’s an economy.

Andrew Keen: Is that the real future economics of the entertainment and information economy?

Esther Dyson: Well Michael is a bit more radical on that and you probably asked him to--.

Andrew Keen: Right.

Esther Dyson: I think they’re going to co-exist for a long time just as industrial and agrarian co-exist and so forth and as I said earlier, the future in the attention economy are unevenly distributed. There are lots of places where people aren’t looking for attention; they’re looking for food.

Andrew Keen: Right.

Esther Dyson: So it varies.

Andrew Keen: What about advertising?

Esther Dyson: What about it?

Andrew Keen: [Laughs] In this so-called attention economy, if people are trying to drive eyeballs to read or watch or listen to what they’re saying how is anyone going to make any money at it?

Esther Dyson: Oh you can make money by helping people get attention. You have a website where someone gets attention; the flows of money, they’re not exactly counter to the flows of attention but they’re--again they’re flowing around there as well. You make money by advertising because somebody buys a product and then part of that--the money that they pay goes to advertising. So it’s--attention to products does exist and that fosters financial progress. Attention to people also directs some financial commerce but it’s the attention you trade and get back and the attention attractiveness people gain by being paid attention to in the first place--sort of this circular thing. They’re all interacting. That was not a great answer. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen: [Laughs] But that--I think that’s one of the challenges of the attention economy is--I think everyone who hears it as an idea is intrigued because it obviously makes some sense, but it’s very difficult to define and in your language crisply--you’re not the only one.

Esther Dyson: Well you’re right and 100 years ago it was very hard to define a lot of other things and then we got behavioral economics and we got lots of models. The thing I like is--I mean there’s some math in here. For example, imagine--I have this notion of one Kissinger--one Kissinger will attract an audience in 10.1 Kissinger people. He will attract an audience of 2,000--0.5 Kissinger people, so everybody is rated as where are you on the Kissinger scale.

Andrew Keen: What does that mean though?

Esther Dyson: Well it means--I mean that’s an analytical metric. A Kissinger is a mention--is a measure--

Andrew Keen: This is a Henry Kissinger?

Esther Dyson: Yeah; it’s a measure of attention production, attention value.

Andrew Keen: Oh I see; you mean--so Kissinger is the ultimate in terms of attention?

Esther Dyson: Well he’s--no, I mean there’s actually like George Bush now is probably 10 Kissingers like it or not, so--but you can sort of measure how big an audience someone will attract and you can have a smaller audience of more important people--you know what will get Kissinger to show up? It’s not 10 guys off the street, but it may be 10 Ministers of Finance or something. Then another interesting metric is you know imagine the President in Poland right.

Andrew Keen: Two aren’t there now--they’re twins.

Esther Dyson: Well one is President and one is Prime Minister or something.

Andrew Keen: Right. [Laughs]

Esther Dyson: So in Poland because there’s also a distance component to attention--in Poland he’s--his--he’s got a very high Kissinger.

Andrew Keen: Right.

Esther Dyson: But if you take the President of Poland and you put him in the US that’s why important people always travel with other people to pay attention to them, so that even when he comes to America he has this cadre of people around him paying attention to him that kind of enclose him in this bubble of attention value because when he goes out of Poland, unless he’s in the State Department in the US he kind of loses that. So you need to give him a protective bubble with people to pay attention to him.

Andrew Keen: So all this attention really is--is a kind of aristocracy right? There are Kissinger(s), there are Bush(s); there are Presidents all--

Esther Dyson: But there are beautiful girls, there are TV stars, there’s sports stars--.

Andrew Keen: Right; there’s the Hilton--the Paris Hilton(s) but in the context of all this given that it’s an aristocracy why are we--so many of us so hopeful that the Internet is resulting in more and more democracy?

Esther Dyson: I think you’re mixing up things; I mean first of all aristocracy--there used to be an aristocracy of land, then there was an aristocracy of money, and now there’s an aristocracy of attention. There’s also--

Andrew Keen: Right.

Esther Dyson: --democracy--I mean I don’t know what the hell democracy means. Liberty is not the same as democracy; democracy is you can vote for the guy you want, but again I think you have a lot more empowered individuals. Your ability to get attention is not as dependent on your birth as it was 300 years--.

Andrew Keen: So it’s a meritocracy of attention?

Esther Dyson: Well that may put it slightly to--you still need to--but I guess the point is there’s no contradiction between there being more personal empowerment and there being an aristocracy of attention. Or there’s not a huge contradiction.

Andrew Keen: Final question Esther and this has been a wonderful interview and you’ll probably tell me off for simplifying things, but what most scares you--very simply? And in 10 years time I can come back and tell you, you were right or wrong.

Esther Dyson: Yeah; well you see in one way nothing scares me. If you told me there was going to be a nuclear holocaust tomorrow--

Andrew Keen: [Laughs] That would scare you wouldn’t it?

Esther Dyson: Well no, no; I mean if you told me how to prevent it, it would scare me that I wouldn’t be able to do by following those rules--that something would go wrong. If you told me there was going to be one tomorrow and there was nothing I could do about it I’d start thinking about well what would I do afterwards.

Andrew Keen: After the holocaust?

Esther Dyson: Yeah; and--and there would be a lot to do so I’d get busy and I’d be happy. [Laughs] You know I mean I’m not scared because I don’t expect it to be perfect anyway, so it’s only a question of degree.

Andrew Keen: Okay.

Esther Dyson: And in terms of the rest of my life I know I’m mortal. If I knew I were immortal I’d be really scared that I couldn’t do everything.

Andrew Keen: Okay.

Esther Dyson: Knowing that I’m mortal, all I need to do is as much as I can.

Andrew Keen: Well what would you like to do; if there is one thing that you can improve--?

Esther Dyson: Well you know I’d like to become god and make everybody happy. If I can't do that--if I had a billion dollars I’d probably spend most of it on education because I think the best thing around to solve the world’s problems is its people, and the only way its people can do that is if they’re educated enough to enjoy all these benefits we talked about. So to me education in the end is the solution to healthcare, economic productivity, democracy, self-empowerment, picking the right government; fundamentally you need to give people the capability to do it for themselves and that’s the education to start making those intelligent decisions.

Andrew Keen: For anyone who wants to follow-up and talk to you about education what would be the best way of doing it?

Esther Dyson: Edyson@edventure.com and that stands for Esther Dyson, but you can imagine it stands for education as well.

Andrew Keen: Esther, thank you so much for appearing on After TV; it’s been great.

Esther Dyson: Thank you.

Narrator: Thanks for listening to After TV, which is hosted and distributed by www.pajamasmedia.com, featuring music by Unity, an artist licensed by Creative Commons. Hope you can join us again.

Joan Blades

Andrew Keen talks motherhood with Joan Blades, author of The Motherhood Manifesto: What America’s Moms Want - and What To Do About It , and founder of MomsRising and MoveOn.org. An excerpt from the book is available in the form of this article at the Nation. Blades discusses the difficulties faced by parents — mothers in particular — in modern business culture and society as a whole, and what we can do to solve them.

LISTEN TO KEEN AND BLADES
 

Andrew Keen: Welcome to After TV, a show about media and technology. Today we’re talking with Joan Blades, who is the founder of www.moveon.org, the founder also of www.momsrising.org, and also the author of a new book about motherhood called the Motherhood Manifesto, which she wrote with Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner. Hi Joan; thanks very much for appearing on After TV.

Joan Blades: Thank you very much for having me.

Andrew Keen: Let’s start with the book, the Motherhood Manifesto; the subtitle is What America’s Moms Want and What to Do about It. So let’s begin at the beginning; what do America’s moms want?

Joan Blades: Well basically America’s moms want to be able to raise their children with all the love and resources that they need to have them grow up into health productive adults. And right now American moms are having a very hard time doing that because shocking as it is and this surprised me when I learned it--there’s huge bias against mothers in the workplace. American mothers make 27-percent less than a dad that’s working. Single mothers make 34 to 44-percent less; a woman that has no kids--maybe 10-percent less, so there’s huge bias against moms who work. Moreover, if a mom wants to get a job, the same resumes--there was a study that went out last year, 2005; 44-percent less likely to be offered a job with the same resume and offered for this high-paying job $11,000 less if they’re a mother. So that’s just the inherent bias against mothers in the workforce. But the Motherhood Manifesto is trying to look at this because it’s a system. There are a lot of reasons why there is this deep bias against mothers in the workplace and it turns out that we do a very poor job of supporting parents--and it’s not just mothers--it’s parents.

Andrew Keen: Are you then distinguishing mothers from women in general? What would be the reason why mothers are more discriminated against than women?

Joan Blades: Well one reason mothers are discriminated against it healthcare benefits. In the opening story, we have the story of Kiki [Pepperdine] who moved to Pennsylvania, had two kids, and she moved there because she needed a place she could afford to raise her kids--and her husband had left her years prior. She went out looking for a job and the first question she was asked was are you married? Do you have children? And she started to see a pattern as these interviews were very, very brief at that point. She was well-qualified, she had good references, but once they found out she was a mother and was not married that was the end of her opportunity. And she ended up on Welfare. And ultimately on one of these job interviews she said why are you asking me this? I’m a very good worker. And the potential employer said well you’ve got kids and if you’re not married I’m going to end up paying the healthcare costs. I would pay you less. And she’s going you’d pay me less--less than the person sitting next to me for the same job? And he said yes. And she called up the Human Relations after that [Laughs] because she was shocked and they said yeah; this is true. That’s allowed. And in more states than not in the US women can be discriminated against based upon being mothers.

Andrew Keen: Are you suggesting then that employers discriminate against mothers because it’s essentially in their interest?

Joan Blades: Well that’s one reason and one of the things we also talk about is the need for work that is compatible with being a primary caregiver. Well a lot of employers are working workers 60 hours a week, and there’s--when you’re paying overtime that doesn’t make any sense at all until you look at the fact that healthcare benefits are so high now employers are doing what would otherwise be a natural act to avoid paying for healthcare. Well what do parents really need? They need to have not 60 hours a week certainly; 40 hours they can--many can cope with; some of them it should be 30 hours. You want parents to be able to take care of their kids. You want parents to be able to--if they can do a 30-hour week and get by that’s great and it’s actually good for the employer too to have two people that know how to do a job so that there is the possibility if one person can't come in that someone else can take over. And it’s--good companies will often find that having that kind of redundancy is great.

Andrew Keen: I know that you’ve distinguished the way in which the American state treats its mothers to other states, particularly in Europe; do you want to say something about that?

Joan Blades: Well the Motherhood Manifesto goes through M-O-T-H-E-R points and the first point is Maternity Leave and that’s a jaw-dropping difference between not just America and Europe but America and the world. In the vast majority of countries in the world mothers will get maternity leave or some support right after having a child. As a matter of fact, out of 168 countries there are only four where new mothers get no support; it’s the United States of America; Papua, New Guinea; Lesotho; and Swaziland. I couldn’t believe that; but yet that’s the case. And what people ask then--what--Europeans and even women from Arab countries [Laughs]--how do the mothers feed their children then? That’s the core question, because we have women going back to work days after giving birth or weeks after giving birth because they can't afford to not work. It’s a choice between feeding their children and taking care of them. And that I might add to this is one of the reasons also that we have such a very high child mortality rate; we pay more per person for our healthcare per capita than any other country in the world, yet in world health ratings we’re 38^th. I mean we’re not even in the top 10 for child mortality, kids five and under.

Andrew Keen: Where do you see the broad structural reasons for this? Why is America like this?

Joan Blades: Well [Sighs] there is a whole host of traditions that we have; most women find they have to work now but we come from a tradition where women didn’t have to work, and so there was an expectation that someone working had no care responsibilities--that they were available whenever and so if you asked for mandatory overtime they could just do it. Well mothers need their jobs and they’re in fact very reliable studies find, but when they’re required to do mandatory overtime and they don’t have childcare lined up all of the sudden they’re in this horrible bind of--leave my toddler home alone at night or lose my job. And that’s what happens all too often. The reality is most women need to work to help support their families and the job should be compatible with being parents. And the happy thing is that when companies do take care of the people that are working for them with that understanding they find they have higher productivity; they have very much better job retention; it’s a win/win, but you know you have to get out of the mindset that you want workers [Laughs] to be there at this hour to that hour and never go away for a teacher conference and all the things that you really actually want parents to do.

Andrew Keen: In your research did you find significant disparities between married and unmarried mothers?

Joan Blades: Certainly a very significant disparity in income level because you know as I said it’s 34 to 44-percent less than a man in the same job on average. And there’s huge numbers of women and children in poverty.

Andrew Keen: So in a sense then your Motherhood Manifesto is particularly pertinent to women who aren’t married?

Joan Blades: It’s tremendously pertinent to women who aren’t married but the fact is it’s tremendously pertinent to everyone here in the United States because we need to make it possible for parents to take good care of their children. In 20 years if we have kids that haven’t been invested in--and that’s basically what it is when we don’t make it possible for parents to take care of their kids--we’re going to be in trouble because the engine of our country, our economy is those kids that are growing up right now. You know we have 40,000 kindergarteners home alone after school in this country; you know I’ve had a kindergartener around recently enough that I know [Laughs] that they’re not people that should be home alone, like the son was talking about whether they’d find dinosaurs at the zoo at that age. It was cute but someone like that shouldn’t be home alone.

Andrew Keen: And do you think there is a connection between this and teenage crime?

Joan Blades: Well the law enforcement really likes after-school programs because that time between 3 o’clock and 6 o’clock in the afternoon is a prime-time for teenage crime and there are all sorts of studies that show that investing in after-school programs in fact saves money because kids have better school outcomes and there’s much less crime. [Laughs] So it’s good for those kids in so many ways and society.

Andrew Keen: So you’ve written this Manifesto; how can we help women get what they want?

Joan Blades: Well that’s why when we--the book was launched we also launched www.momsrising.org, and Moms Rising is--

Andrew Keen: And that’s obviously an Internet site?

Joan Blades: That is an Internet site and as a founder of Move On, I’ve really come to respect and have huge appreciation for how intelligent and powerful the grassroots are when they come together. And I believe that mothers and in fact anyone that has a mother should get involved and can get involved in a meaningful way to put these issues on the radar because the sad thing is all these issues are almost never on the front page and the result is we’ve had decades of knowing we needed to do something and so very little has happened. So we’re trying to provide the political capital and make it possible to move some of these issues like maternity leave. And I want to say that California is the first state to have paid maternity leave for six weeks and that is actually paid by California workers. And it’s one of those issues that crosses political lines and cultural lines and economic lines; most people really understand the need to support new families. And it’s parentally, it’s maternally maternity leave because that--it really is about being able to take care of the kid.

Andrew Keen: So what exactly is www.momsrising.org?

Joan Blades: Well it’s a brand new organization where we are helping women and organizations engage on these issues. We have petitions like Move On does to help focus leadership on issues but we’re also trying to work on cultural levels as well because we’re not going to grow in the same way Move On did because Move On works on front-page issues where there’s a whole lot of public energy already and these are issues that aren’t front-page, so it’s going to be very much friends telling friends and finding ways to make a change and improve things not only at the you know legislative level but also in their community because there are things you can do in the community, in your workspace--. And there’s one great story in the book about Jim Johnson, who runs a business--a moving business in Colorado and it’s been in his family for 100 years. And when he heard a lecture by Joan Williams it resonated for him; he became interested. He has daughters as well as sons and he wants them to have the same opportunities that his sons had, and he never thought that there was in fact an inherent bias against mothers. And he went back to his company and he asked and he found out well do these policies hurt mothers? You know and he got the answer yes, and as a result of the answers he got he changed the way he structured his work. And what he found was when people--it was results-oriented goals as opposed to you know the eight-hour day and how--and people could work at home, he found that he actually was more productive, his company was