Smart Mobs

by Howard Rheingold

  The most interesting implications are the ways these tools can allow loosely related people to cooperate and collectively create a range of services that are otherwise costly or impractical. These tools allow groups of unrelated people to cooperate with one another by providing a framework for possible sanctions for misconduct and assurances of prior cooperation. As a result, matchmaking services supported by reputation services may be one of the most central applications. If people who can provide one another with a needed good or service can easily find one another and get assurances and recourse so that they can trust one another, a wealth of pent-up value can be released.45

  None of the theories and data gathered by biologists, sociologists, and economists predicts what populations will do in an environment of ad hoc networks, wearable computers, pervasive media, and online reputation systems, but most of the conditions for a phase change in the scale of cooperation could be met by smart mob infrastructure: mutual monitoring, graduated sanctions, widespread dissemination of both positive and negative reputation information, ease of locating and verifying other potential cooperators, and global social networks that cluster people by affinity. In order for such an infrastructure to be everywhere, inexpensive, and always available, it is going to have to complete a passage that is presently underway, the transition to a wireless world.

  The build-out of a planetary communication system in the form of wires, satellites, and optical cables took about a century. This build-out was largely a top-down enterprise, organized by telecommunication monopolies and regulated by government bureaucracies. Toward the end of the process, when a sufficient number of people were interconnected, bottom-up grassroots applications transformed the original wired infrastructure into entirely new phenomena like the Web, virtual communities, and p2p networks. The build-out of the wireless infrastructure, now in its final stages, is at present a cacophony of top-down and grassroots movements, standards, and industries. The telecommunications giants of the previous, wired epoch have staked their claims to the future in the form of expensive licenses for slices of the electromagnetic spectrum—the high-stakes, still iffy 3G era of mobile telephony. At the same time that the 3G dinosaur seems stalled in a mire of financial and technical difficulties, a nimble breed of mammal seems to be multiplying rapidly down there in the grassroots—the amateurs who have taken advantage of a loophole in the restrictive regulation of the radio spectrum to create shared wireless networks.

  6

  Wireless Quilts

  Because nobody controlled what people did with the Internet, millions of people invented new things to do with the Internet. They innovated because they had a guaranteed right to publish web pages or start businesses or create applications like the World Wide Web. This explosive innovation happened because the Internet was held in commons—an innovation commons—instead of auctioned off. Policymakers, faced with the opportunity to create an innovation commons for the wireless Internet, want to sell the right to innovate to the highest bidder.We’re at a critical point where we’re choosing which path to go down, and the problem is that most people in wireless policymaking are control freaks. They’re the Soviets of our time. They think the only way to run an economy is if the government decides who uses spectrum for what purposes. I fear that the Soviet mentality will destroy innovation here. Instead of top-down control, we need radical decentralized opportunity to innovate and create using this medium.

  —Lawrence Lessig

  Unwiring the World, One Neighborhood at a Time

  I had heard übergeek friends rhapsodize about “wireless freenets” and something called “eight oh two dot eleven bee,” but I never watched anyone pull an Internet connection out of the air until Lars Aronsson, instigator of Elektrosmog, flipped open his laptop and surfed the Web from a café near Stockholm’s Sergel Square. Elektrosmog is one of the groups that materialized in dozens of cities around the world in 20002002 around the goal of connecting neighborhood wireless access points into “a cloud of free Internet connectivity that will cover most inhabited areas.”1 When I returned from Stockholm in June 2001, I walked around San Francisco with a friend who downloaded streaming video to his computer from the atrium inside an office building where unsecured commercial wireless networks inadvertently extended their clouds of connectivity.

  While I pursued my investigation of smart mobs, wireless networks were surfacing in places where computer users cluster—coffee shops. Recalling earlier links between smart mob experimentation and caffeinated conviviality, the PARCtab and Cambridge webcam coffeepots, I wasn’t surprised to learn that wireless broadband startup MobileStar, in partnership with Microsoft, started installing wireless networks in hundreds of Star-bucks coffee shops.2 By February 2002, wireless access came to the café in my own suburban town, through a commercial enterprise called Surf and Sip.3 Whether you seek corporate or co-op flavor of wireless broadband, the best way to find public wireless Internet access in a new city these days is to go where expensive coffee is served.

  MobileStar’s business ran into trouble at the end of 2001 and was purchased by telecommunications giant VoiceStream in 2002.4 However, mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications industry are not the only powerful influence on future smart mob infrastructure. While telephone companies eat and digest wireless broadband startups in the commercial arena, gangs of amateurs all over the world are quietly growing ad hoc networks from the neighborhood up.

  Waiting for 3G services from the telephone companies of the world isn’t the only way to access the Internet wirelessly and at high speeds, claims Lars Aronsson and his confrères in the community wireless movement. The tech news that had my übergeek friends buzzing, known formally as “wireless LANs” (local area networks) and “ad hoc peer-to-peer networks,” precipitated a new community of homebrew innovators. Once again, a freemasonry of volunteers has a chance to build a new medium that increases in value when it is shared. This time, the people who use and create the infrastructure have an opportunity to own it.

  Recent technical and regulatory events have made it possible for citizens to share wireless Internet access today at speeds higher than expected for 3G in the future. A radio beacon access point costs $100$500, and a 1.5 megabit per second (T1) leased line to connect the beacon to the Internet costs around $500$800 per month. Many laptop computers, equipped with easy to install 802.11b (wireless) cards, can use that wireless access point’s Net connection simultaneously. More expensive, higher-speed Internet access through T3 lines or coaxial cable can support populations of wireless connections up to 5 megabits per second. (More about what those megabits mean in a moment.) New technology and social contracts make it possible for a relatively small number of people to do what used to require huge corporate monopolies.

  Wireless LANs aren’t a free lunch, but they make possible an extremely inexpensive lunch, and you can now pack your own lunch instead of buying only the monopoly brand. Someone has to buy a high-speed Internet connection from an existing (“upstream”) provider in order to support a (“downstream”) wireless community, but now the community of users has the power to do things that only the connection provider could do in the past. One other salient factor is a technique known as “voice over Internet Protocol,” which makes it cost-effective to carry voice conversations on user-owned wireless networks.

  Whether wireless guerrillas blanket the world with inexpensive high-speed Internet access before the big players crush them remains to be seen. Open wireless cooperatives have the advantage of starting with zero debt (it doesn’t cost any more to provide “community” wireless access than it would to provide wireless access for your own home), whereas 3G providers are saddled with billions in startup costs from spectrum licenses to towers to rights-of-way. One thing that nobody disputes is that wireless technologies are a cost-effective way to bring high-speed Internet services to what is known as “the local loop” or “the last mile”—the connection between people’s PCs or mobile devices and the fast fiber optic
networks that pump data around the world at what are known as “broadband speeds.” Wireless is undoubtedly the best way to bring online the majority of the world’s population. Wiring the world over the past century, from the telegraph to the Internet, disrupted old social patterns and led to the creation of new ones. Unwiring the world over the next decades will disrupt existing social arrangements just as profoundly, in several different ways:

  Untethering the Web colonizes the world with computation, pervading environments far from the desktop with networked intelligent devices. Computation, once available only through wired access points, becomes available everywhere.

  Telecommunications networks become available in places where wires weren’t previously economically feasible. One in eight people in Botswana have a mobile telephone.5 Some of the most advanced wireless LAN experiments in the United States are on Indian reservations that don’t have telephone lines.

  High data-speeds made possible by radio-based technologies are likely to multiply the effects of mobile Internet in unpredictable ways as well. In digital media, quantum leaps in speed often trigger qualitative jumps in the ways people use them.

  Just as photography changes to cinema at 24 frames per second, and the Internet changed to the Web at tens of thousands of bits per second, broadband portends a transformation in the nature of the medium of mobile Internet. Broadband is about data transfer rates of tens of millions of bits per second. Combine high transfer rates, yesterday’s supercomputer on today’s chips, and p2p methodology, and many things presently unimagined become possible.

  “802.11b” is a number I hear a lot when wireless freenetters talk. Also known as “WiFi,” 802.11b refers to a technical standard, ratified by the FCC’s Project 802 committee in 1999, about the way data can be sent via a small slice of the radio spectrum open for unlicensed use.6 Although the use of most of the electromagnetic spectrum is restricted by governments for military and licensed commercial use, a small amount of available spectrum has been kept open for unlicensed use, which allows garage door openers, cordless telephone receivers, and guerrilla wireless networks to operate. A few visionaries at the FCC had been pushing to open some of the spectrum for experimentation since the early 1980s. A movement initiated by Apple Computer in the 1990s took advantage of this tiny loophole, which made it possible to set up base stations, plug an inexpensive card into a laptop, and provide Internet access at up to 11 megabytes per second (5 times faster than 3G, 150 times faster than a dial-up modem), within a few hundred feet of an access point connected to the Net (and up to tens of miles with inexpensive external antennae).7 The lobbying process initiated by Apple succeeded in adding more bandwidth to the unlicensed spectrum, and in 1999 Apple introduced its “Airport” 802.11b networking software, which brought the price of an access point down to $300.

  The bottom-up force of wireless freenetting and the top-down force of 3G mobile telephony are heading for decisive conflicts over the next five years. An eventual showdown has been inevitable since the U.S. government locked its regulatory framework onto a technical understanding of wireless technologies as it stood in 19121934. In response to the sinking of the Titanic, which involved various wireless communication snafus, the United States and other nations began regulating—and leasing—use of the electromagnetic spectrum. The Radio Act of 1927 allocated the radio spectrum to broadcasters through licensing, created a high-level regulatory authority, the Federal Radio Commission, and made unlicensed broadcasting a criminal offense. The Communications Act of 1934 added authority over telephone and telegraph communications and created the Federal Communications Commission.8 The 1927 and 1934 laws established that airways are public property, that commercial broadcasters must be licensed to use the airways, and that the main condition for use is whether the broadcaster serves “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”9

  Since only specialists understand (or even hear about) the fine points of wireless technologies and their regulatory implications, the big-boys-only business of selling the spectrum has largely been ignored by the citizens on whose behalf the transactions were executed.10 Economist Ronald Coase, who later won a Nobel Prize, convinced the FCC that auctioning spectrum was more efficient and inherently more fair than the original license-granting procedure because it eliminated outright granting of licenses as political favors and insured that the owner of a spectrum license, having paid top dollar for it, would be motivated to develop the use of that spectrum allocation.11 Top dollar in a public auction is indeed more open than political deal making. As a consequence, however, “public interest, convenience, and necessity” have been defined by those with the largest stake in yesteryear’s technologies.

  Recently, those who are knowledgeable about the law and about the state of the art of radio technologies are challenging the idea that chopping up the frequency bands into specific pieces of property is the most efficient way to use the resource. In a Foreign Policy article, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig wrote: “Americans are captivated by the idea, as explained by Yale Law School professor Carol Rose, that the world is best managed “when divided among private owners” and when the market perfectly regulates those divided resources. But the Internet took off precisely because core resources were not “divided among private owners.” Instead, the core resources of the Internet were left in a “commons.”12 Keep in mind, that a commons in the spectrum would not necessarily replace the ownership of licenses for parts of the spectrum—large parts of the spectrum could be allocated to commons and to auctioned property. And the establishment of a commons doesn’t rule out private enterprise. Plenty of private enterprises grew up around the Internet, and unlike the spectrum, no large chunks of the original Internet were sold for the exclusive use of one enterprise.

  Telecommunication companies around the world paid more than $150 billion to various governments in the late 1990s for licenses to use portions of the electromagnetic spectrum for future commercial purposes such as broadband access for mobile phones.13 At the same time that governments were auctioning off the electromagnetic spectrum, rapidly evolving wireless communication technologies started making it possible to treat the spectrum as abundant rather than scarce. Technologies known as “spread spectrum,” “wideband,” and “software-defined radio” have explosive implications. If the spectrum ceases to be a scarce resource because of technological innovation, then the government doesn’t need to regulate its use to protect its owners, the citizens, in the same way it did when the spectrum was first regulated at the beginning of the radio age. The neighborhood wireless activists are up against powerful financial interests and political powers, from AT&T to the FCC. But they have Moore’s, Metcalfe’s, and Reed’s laws on their side.14

  In 1999 and 2000, geeks around the world started getting the same idea. Matt Westervelt in Seattle, a systems administrator for Real Networks, created a Web site with a map of his neighborhood in Seattle and invited anyone who put up a base station to mark it on the map.15 In London, James Stevens established “Consume the Net” with the invitation: “Fed up with being held to ransom in the local loop, phased by fees to ISP’s, conscious of community? OK so let’s build a fresh network, one that is local, global, fast, expanding, public and user-constructed.”16 Instead of a telecommunications corporation, a consumer-owned cooperative corporation could govern these newly possible enterprises.

  If all the infrastructure for a grassroots wireless network can be built from inexpensive, easily installable access points that radiate high-speed Internet access within several hundred feet, and if overlapping networks can cooperate in moving bits of data around the way the interconnected networks of the Internet do, then grassroots networks in an urban area could piece together what Lars Aronsson and others call a cloud of wireless Internet access. Usenet also started as a patchworked, peer-to-peer network in which each node paid its own way. Imagine a Usenet of inexpensive, low-power wireless access points that each serves hundreds of mobile devices in its vicinity.


  If one thing unites the disparate WiFi activists, it’s the conviction that they are asserting a right to a public good. The telephone wires, coaxial cables, satellites, and optical networks that brought us the first, wired phase of the Internet—a physical infrastructure that was created and owned by someone who charges for access to it—is not required for WiFi. Everybody owns the airwaves. You buy a radio or base station, and what you and your neighbors agree to do with them, including creating your own network of contiguous access points, is your business. Elektrosmog, Aaronsson wrote on the organization’s Web site, “grew out of a skepticism toward the claims of the telecom industry regarding the usefulness and success of the future ‘third-generation mobile telephone systems’ (3G) as the only means to implement the wireless Internet.”17 Boston-centered Guerrilla Net’s Brian Oblivion foresees a self-sufficient infrastructure that “requires a networking fabric which lies outside of governments, commercial Internet Service Providers, telecommunications companies, and dubious Internet regulatory committees.18 Or, as WirelessAnarchy puts it: “Cheaply and easily, using off-the-shelf equipment and a little ingenuity, you too can create your own net. It’s wireless, it’s anarchy, it’s your ISP’s worst nightmare.”19

  Anthony Townsend, research scientist at New York University’s Taub Urban Research Center, takes a more civic than anarchic approach to wireless networking: “We’re trying to build a public service,” he told me during a 2002 telephone interview.20 Townsend teamed up with Terry Schmidt to open the first node of their network in May 2001 at a coffee shop near Schmidt’s apartment.21 NYCWireless now provides free broadband wireless access in more than thirty “hotspots” in New York City, including Washington Square Park, Tompkins Square Park, and MacDougal Street in the West Village.22 As an urban planner, Townsend is particularly interested in the way WiFi affects the way people use public places, and he remains confident that informed designers can nudge the effects of WiFi on cities toward the convivial and away from the alienating.