Author, entrepreneur and co-founder of WIRED John Battelle says we must get over the “extraordinary inertia” of the Internet we’ve built. Learn how federation could be the answer, from someone who’s been tracking this space for over 30 years.
The Internet as we know it is now over 30 years old, and author John Battelle says we must get over the ‘extraordinary inertia’ of the system we’ve built. He would know: As a founder of WIRED Magazine and as an entrepreneur himself, John’s been tracking and writing about the evolution of technology and its impact on society for a long time.
What exactly is the difference between what he calls “the internet that we have and the one that we deserve”? Why are we now at an inflection point? Can we still fix the system? How would monetization work in this world?
Highlights from this conversation include:
🔎 You can follow John on his Website and on Threads https://www.threads.net/@johnbattelle
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon.
💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
We're at this moment in time where there's an incredible opportunity for innovation. It's not just what's happening in AI, although that's certainly very important. It's what's unfolding on the open social web.
The Internet as we know it is now over 30 years old. And our guest today says we must get over the extraordinary inertia of the system we felt.
Welcome to dot social, the first podcast about the world of decentralized social media, also known as the Fediverse. Each episode host Mike McCue talks to a leader in this movement. Someone who sees the Fediverse has tremendous potential, and understands that this could be the internet's next wave.
Today, Mike's talking to John Battelle. John has so many accomplishments. But he's perhaps best known as a co-founder of WIRED Magazine. He's also an entrepreneur who's founded Web 2.0 conferences, Federated Media Publishing, the Industry Standard and The Recount. He's an author who's written about Google, and is now working on a book about “the internet we deserve, not the internet that we have.” We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
All right, John Battelle, welcome to the podcast.
John Battelle:
So good to be here, Mike.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, that's great to have you, man. It's, we go back a long ways. And we've seen a lot you've seen a lot.
John Battelle:
So have you.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, and and, you know, from different vantage points. And it's gonna be really exciting to talk to you about, you know, how you're seeing the future shaping for the internet and the web. But I thought it'd be a great place to start would be way back when you started as a founder of WIRED. And in the early days of digital media, when there was no banner advertising, there was, you know, we were just putting things from print onto onto digital. Can you tell us a little bit about those those days, those early days? Yeah,
John Battelle:
it's funny that you brought up the banner advertising stuff, because a wire we have a pretty fundamental intersection with history as it relates to how kind of the whole shitshow the internet evolved. I actually call it the original sin. So we founded WIRED, in 92, we launched the first issue of the magazine in January 93. And, you know, just at the last minute, before we go into publication, I, for the first four years WIRED, I wrote a column that ran through the front of the book, I wrote this column that was just sort of, you know, random items of interest that didn't make it into the magazine, right. I think the column was called Flux F-L-U-X anyway, just at the last minute, I got an item in from a fellow that we were working with, who was writing for us, out of London. And he was kind of covering Europe, you know, for us. And he, he said, You know, there's this interesting thing coming out of CERN is guy, Tim Berners-Lee is doing this thing called the World Wide Web. might want to check it out. So, you know, I, I was on a bunch of forums and stuff and you know, Usenet and you know, I was pretty into the online world pre web. So I did my best to figure out what was going on. I wasn't totally sure. But I put an item in the January magazine about it, which no one read because the column was tiny, and sort of, you know, designed in the way WIRED was very hard to read, right. But it allowed us to claim that we didn't miss the internet. You know, when we launched as a paper magazine, right, and that the World Wide Web, we didn't miss that. So. And then, of course, from that point forward for five years while I was still, you know, at the magazine, we covered it really, really closely. About a year after we did the first issue of the magazine. We were planning the launch of hotwire, which was our version of WIRED Magazine, on the web. You know, at scale publishing endeavors, commercial publishing endeavors. And we were hiring a ton of young journalists to cover all sorts of things, you know, business culture, you know, technology, blah, blah, blah. But actually, we didn't want to just do a digital version of WIRED, right. We wanted to reinvent everything for the medium, right? That was Louis, our co founder and editor in chief. He's like, we can't just shuffle you know, our wire. Stories onto the web. So we had to reinvent everything. So I was, you know, in this meeting where we were talking about our plans to launch power WIRED, and it was just four or five of us. And, and I sort of, like raised my hand and asked the obvious question, which is, how are we gonna pay for this? You know, like, you know, like, how are we going to, you know, and so that got, you know, Kevin Kelly and myself and John Plunkett, who's the design director. And Louis, we had this sort of, you know, head scratching moment. It's like, well, for the magazine, of course, we have subscriptions. And we have advertising, but we certainly can't charge for anything on the internet, because people are already very grumpy about the fact that they have to pay for their, you know, ISP, right? And it's kind of like, I'm already paying once for the internet, and don't make me pay again, right. So, you know, Stuart Brand, and many others were our advisors and Stuart brands famous, out of context, quote, is information wants to be free, right? So we're like, we don't want to charge. And I'm like, well, that leaves advertising. And, and Lewis is like, the what are the ads look like? Because there was no display advertising, right. And, and, and I'm like, Well, you know, I'm on prodigy. It's like one of the only places this old online service called prodigy that dial up online service takes over your whole screen, right? And controls everything. And at the bottom of the Prodigy, you know, screen was this banner advertisement, which usually, I think was owned by Sears, it was usually either for Sears or for, like, I think they had a joint venture with, like, some consulting firm, you know? And so I'm like, well, maybe we could use that we could do like a banner like that, except we would render it, you know, in HTML on on a web browser. And Louis sort of gets this, you know, Spark and design. It's like, I know what we'll do, we'll put the banner up at the top. So when people are on our site, they can scroll it out of the way. We're just like, you know, that's the first time people ever said, banner ads are worth nothing. Right? And and I said, Well, that sounds great, Louis, let's do that. And so then, you know, he talked to the engineers over at HotWIRED. Right? And I said, and then we had another meeting or something. And I said, Louis, there's one thing that's been bothering him about this whole idea of the banner ads, and this is what I get to the original sin. I said, you know, I was a fresh graduate from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and I, you know, I, very highfalutin ideas about separation of church and state, right. And I said, I don't want the content from advertising in the same content management system as the content for editorial. I think that would be bad, I think it'd be better have a separate kind of whole system for the ads, that might be helpful to, you know, in any case, because we were, we were literally making all this shit up. Right? And he's like, Yeah, you're totally right. We don't want to do that. So he talks to the engineers, and they build the first ad server that served only ads, right. And, and separated advertising from editorial, which created this entire industry, right, that separated advertising, from the context of the individuals that were consuming our content, and open the door for the identity problems that have plagued the internet ever since open the door for the fraud problems that have plagued the internet ever since. And, and, you know, had we just said, No, we wanted to connect the two and keep them connected, and sort of build that into the protocol of how advertising works going forward. I think it's possible, we might have been able to save ourselves a awful lot. But it turns out that the ad server that they built at HotWIRED, and a lot of the other technology became a patchy which is like, you know, under right, so so it essentially was the very first ad ever commercial ad on the internet then came out a little bit later, it was at&t, it was a banner at the top of hotwire and it got like a 70% click through because everyone's like, What the hell is this? Right. And, and, and of course, you may recall I'm sure you do Mike the the actual content. I mean, I think we were at Netscape at the time, right. And the the actual content was, have you ever clicked here you will?
Mike McCue:
Actually, right now that you mentioned it, I remember that vividly.
John Battelle:
Yes. And the truth is everyone did. And that's the last time The highest performing banner ad of all time. All Time. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and then they just like every year fell by an order of magnitude until it went down to point 007, which is, I think where it is now from 70%. So, yeah, that's incredible.
Mike McCue:
What an awesome story. And you know, to, to think back on that time, when, you know, the Internet was so new, a lot of people had no idea or didn't even believe that it was really going to be amounted to anything, you know, AOL prodigy, I mean, AOL really pretty much dominated the entire was,
John Battelle:
yeah, AOL was it? It really was. I mean, AOL was yeah, the sort of the equivalent AOL did for online what, you know, the Macintosh did for personal computers, right. It just brought everything together made it much easier. And had a you know, marketing genius running it. Just like Apple, you know, Steve Jobs. And Steve Case did a lot to literally get America Online.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, but then they realized that they had to connect to the internet. And that was the beginning of the end for them. Yeah. It's so interesting. You know, you look back with 2020 hindsight on those days, and like the what ifs start to emerge, you know, what if we had built identity in from the beginning, right? Another what f that I asked myself is what if we had if the web wasn't just links to between web pages, but was also links to people? Who were fundamentally part of the web? What if, right, had we done that, then? And that is those kinds of fundamental problems, I do think, or the fact that those didn't exist, have led to everything we've seen today, both the good and the bad. Yeah, a lot of a lot of bad, a lot of problematic, you know, things. And so when you look back, you know, now, and you've seen, of course, you've had a ringside seat through the entire evolution of the industry, right, as you've went on to build other companies, you know, running the web con, the Web Summit Conference that, you know, building, you know, and working with other entrepreneurs, and creators and digital, digital media, you know, founders and so on, when you look at how all of this has progressed, and you look at where we're at now, ya know, do you still feel hopeful that there is opportunity to, to make the Internet work better the way, you know, we learned the right lessons? And do you feel like the technology could happen such that we could make the internet be fundamentally better?
John Battelle:
Yeah. I mean, my short answer is yes. The longer answer is apparel comes to mind, the political system of the United States. You know, if you were to ask almost anybody right now, who's engaged in the political system in the United States, in the last startup that I that I just exited, covered national politics, for digital media for social media, actually, we can't super fun. But, you know, the political system, the United States of USA, you know, it's this experiment that we started, you know, 200 and, you know, 25 years ago, whenever it was, you know, are you optimistic about it? It's like, well, you know, it's the worst we've got, except for everything else. Right. And, and so yeah, I'm optimistic about it. But man, what a mess, right? However, we are at this moment. And the last time you and I spoke, you know, we agreed, it's kind of this long moment, that sort of thing. I don't know, three to five years might be in the middle of it, we might be in the first year of it. But we're in this moment, where it seems like we're inflecting I say that the internet grew up and got a brain, right. And it right now it's in the process of sort of figuring out the internet itself, what it means to be able to have a conversation with human beings, with technology can talk to human beings in a way that makes value for not only human beings, but the technology itself. It's it starts this recursive learning, you know, loop with this ongoing, it's kinda like what Google did with text queries, you can start to imagine at scale people talking to the internet, and the Internet, just getting super smart, right? And that, and everyone says, That's generative AI and I think that that's probably what's going to stick is Gen AI just kind of like blogs stuck and other terrible words, but in any case, AI, we're at this moment where it seems like there's an incredible amount of opportunity, innovation potential for innovation. And it's super exciting. So I get very optimistic when I think about the world as it could be given these new tools that are being built in this ecosystem that's starting to come together around that. But we have to get over the extraordinary inertia of the system we've built over the last 30 years, which is this unholy amalgam of steroidal capitalism. And essentially, oligarchic companies that have created a governance system based on their terms of service and user licensing, licensing agreements, which essentially ensure that the world that I can't imagine happening because of the inflection we're in, won't happen, if we stick to the way things are currently being run, right. And, and so we've got to get over that. And, and, you know, for example, AI agents working on any of our behalf, anyone listening to this, you or me, any, there's no good word for end user, but you know, any consumer, that's a terrible word to person, citizen human, who is, you know, wants to automate their health claim, insurance filing and appeals process, right. So any of us who have dealt with this know that it's like, a black hole of wasted time, right. But imagine a little AI agent that some entrepreneur dreamt up, that, you know, scans, all of your email, all of your anything that you want to scan in any picture, you might take of a paper form, you get, right, all of the policies of any health provider in the chain of trying to deal with all this bullshit, the insurance companies, the, the the hospital, you might have gone to your doctor's whatever, and figures out how to navigate all that shit for you. Right? I can imagine an entrepreneur building such a agent. And I know the technology exists for at least v one of that and then to get better and better, right. But in order for this to work, that agent needs permission to act as your agent and go snarf. All that data down from Google's Gmail or Microsoft Outlook ran from the Columbia healthcare system, and from an from an from, and these established large organizations with this sclerotic approach to the world will be like, no, no, no, no, no, we can't, we can't let you have access to your own data, because that's automated scraping. And that's bad. And it's malicious, right? And they'll say it's because it's potential vector for fraud. And they'll say it's because it's, you know, potential vector for malicious actors. But it's actually because they're terrified of the future, right. And they don't want to let go the business model that's making them profit right now. Right. And that's what we have to get over. That's the block. So you know, and that's actually the work that I'm now doing isn't to make those companies per se, I'm encouraging them being made by investing in in, in in entrepreneurs are doing that. But I'm also really now focusing almost all my work on writing about this, and trying to sort of do the best I can lay out a vision for how this could be layout and understanding of how we got to where we are so that we can get over this, you know, blockage that we have in our way to what I think could be to try to put a bow on a very long answer to your very short question, an optimistic future for the internet.
Mike McCue:
You have a great blog post on your search blog, about, you know, the sites that never get built. Why it's really hard now to build, you know, an experiment on the internet? And what are some of the things we could be doing to change that? And for the better, and, you know, one of the things that I'm particularly interested in hearing your thoughts on is how you see social media. As part of that, you know, for people who are wanting to experiment with new approaches to social media, that can be better that can be taken out that can be built on, you know, some good solid first principles. One of the things that I think is really powerful about Federation and activity pub in the social web is that someone can build a new service Have that maybe it's an amazing video editing system and filtering system, right. But they don't have to also build a whole social network to even work. They don't have to build an incredibly new sort of monetization thing tying that with advertising, they can focus on that piece, right? And the audience who is on the web can just use it, and they don't have people who can join, they don't have to re follow people and build a whole new profile, they can just act. Right. And that's, that's an example of the kind of thing that I think, as we start to get these kinds of standards to happen on the internet, on we can enable that kind of individualistic experimentation again, yeah,
John Battelle:
Exactly. Like what I think you're getting at is in what this reminds me of, I've been rereading some, some books from kind of from the mid aughts, like Jonathan Zittrain “The Future of the Internet and How to Avoid It.” And, and, you know, a lot of people either forget or simply didn't, you know, weren't alive back in the days with the heady days of the PC industry, when the personal computer was a generative machine, right, you know, you could make a PhotoFiltre app and, and sell it for 14 bucks. Right. And, and, and in the early internet was a generative machine, you could make a website that that you could upload phone photos to, and then it would do filters on it, right? You didn't need to make a big platform like snap or Instagram, that after it's scaled to 200 million people, right, then they started making photo filters and photo, you know, and all that cool stuff. But of course, it was all locked into just that one social network, right. And so my point of the blog post that I wrote was, you know, it wouldn't be better. And I think what you're basically in violent agreement with me, if people could just make the cool thing and not have to worry about all the other like the all the massive distribution problems that you have in social networks today. So it starts with Federation, you'll probably remember that I started a company in 2004, called Federated Media. Yeah. And it was what I called, at the time, not a social media company, it was what I called a conversational media company. Because the idea was to encourage and engage conversations between people. And it was about blogs at the time. And what killed it, you know, eight years later, was social media was essentially the newsfeed the Facebook newsfeed just killed, it killed blogs and my companies. I mean, I sold it, but wasn't a great outcome for anybody. So I think the Federation thing is really, really important because it will allow innovation to occur where it should occur at the edge, as opposed to, you know, in a centralized, you know, at scale. platform, right. And, and I wrote a post in 2012, I think it was hard to look it up. Where I argued that Facebook, it's time, which was the Bugaboo might have been my bugaboo for 10 years now. I said, you know, Facebook, if you just allowed everybody to carry their network with them wherever they went, you'd have to compete above the level of locking on social network, and instead on the level of what you did with that social network to add value, and if you unleashed that, first of all, you'd be a much cooler place to work. Secondly, like you have a lot of at scale advantages to figure out what the next cool things would be, you know, and thirdly, people would want to work with you. And you probably get a bunch of, you know, new revenue from a developer line kind of the way Microsoft made a bunch of revenue from developers and still does and all the cloud platforms now do. You know, I mean, it's why Salesforce and snowflake and everyone else, you know, is building and has built these at scale platform businesses that are generative in nature, right. We need an at scale, generative consumer platform. Right. It used to be the internet. Right. And it could again, be the internet. And that's what I'm hoping we'll get to.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I think the the point you're making around the sort of decentralization of innovation, right. That's, that's what the internet is all about. It's about decentralizing everything to the edge and decentralizing the innovation is such a powerful idea. And you know, I think Facebook, you know, now with meta now with threads, um, They are saying that they're going to let you take your network with you. They haven't actually done it yet, but haven't done it yet. But what's your take on all of that?
John Battelle:
It's funny, I've been on threads since the beginning. And I've watched it, you know, develop. And I've watched it in month by month, what for months now? become, you know, Twitter, six or seven years ago, like, maybe eight or eight or nine years ago, like it hasn't, it hasn't quite gotten to the point where, you know, once you have a certain number of followers, you can tweet it, some companies handle them, they'll pay attention to you. I mean, I'll never forget the first time I got Comcast service call, because I tweeted at Comcast, right. It's not there yet. But what's happened in the last couple of weeks. And most importantly, you know, with the awful, you know, terrorist shit and response that's going on in Israel and on the Gaza in Gaza, is it's become more of a news platform, at least for me, because I guess I follow, you know, a lot of people in the journalism world. I don't miss Twitter at all. I left Twitter a year ago, as soon as Elon Musk bought it, I laughed. Yeah, I left my account open. And I just paid, I just said, you know, join me on Mastodon is actually where I went, but I have been watching threads. And I'm very hopeful that they're going to do what you've done, what WordPress is doing. And you know, some other organizations are doing which is commit to Federation, they've said they will. It's not in their interest to do that, in the sort of, you know, myopic short term version of what met as you know, interests are, but in the long term interests of what we've been discussing, I think it's very much in their interest. And it would be extremely beneficial to the rest of the internet, if you know, 100 to 100 million people all of a sudden started to understand what it meant to be, you know, social network independent. And to have those options as an entrepreneur to start to say, Hey, I got to do this cool thing, bring your own network, you know.
Mike McCue:
So I imagine that ever imagine that back before, when you were cell phones were a new thing, you know, and you bought a new cell phone, you got a new, you know, new, you switched to a different provider, you had to switch your phone number, yeah, this was locked in there, right. And the myopic view would be keep that lock in, because we don't want our business to be impacted. But the long term, proper view, and this is, of course, what played out is you set it up so that there's number portability. And now more people will come to your platform, people are going to be competing at higher levels, about quality of service, etc. And I think the same absolutely could hold true for Facebook, it would be it would be a massive step forward for the social web. If they follow through on their plans. And it does, it does seem like they're gonna do it.
John Battelle:
I mean, they're not walking back from it, but it clearly has not made the top five of their, of what they're trying to build, you know, their, their current, you know, you know, punch list seems to not include doing that. And the longer they wait, you know, I think it's gonna get, the more complicated, it probably is going to be in terms of the scale. But hopefully, they're sort of building the plumbing underneath to ensure that it's not that difficult to do. Yeah, we'll see. But, you know, the other thing about the evolution of the social web that, that you sort of picked earlier, I want to just bring that up again, which, you know, I know you're very passionate about is this idea of, of individual to individual, because I think it was presumptive in the early web, that if you had a website, that was you, right, and that's a an assumption I made that was wrong. That that I thought it 2001 to 2008 or so that kind of everyone would have a website, right. And, you know, over time, as the tools got easier to use, and you know, as WordPress started to dominate, I thought, Well, everybody's just going to have their site and then those sites will be able to connect to each other. And then more and more sophisticated stuff will start to be built that you can plug into that site that is essentially like your autonomous little module of identity that is managed through your site. Right? And, you know, of course, what happened, I should have realized, is that convenience one? And you know, Facebook's like Nah, man, do you want your identity just come to this, we'll do all the hardship, just punch in a few, like your name or birthday, you know, we'll do the rest. Right. And, and I am a little disappointed in myself for not realizing, like, the harder way to go is usually not the way it goes at scale. And, and so, you know, I think there's an opportunity with Federation to get back to that, to have a an identity independent of, of a site. Right. Right. And that's exciting. And I do think that the AI piece has something to do with it. I also do think, and what are we like 40 minutes in, and we haven't even mentioned this so good for us. I think there is a role for the technologies that underpin crypto. I'm not saying, you know, we should all have an economy where we sell each other's reputation. That's already happened. It's not it's not really working. But I do think that there's, you know, trust lessness is an important concept. And so I think, you know, those kinds of pieces can start to get layered in. But, you know, it has to be easy.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. Well, you you're touching on something, I think is really important here, the assuming that threads federates, assuming that activity pub continues to advance and the social web grows, now you have a different set of things that start to emerge as challenges, you know, identity, monetization, moderation, at scale. And so there's no shortage of things that will still have to be tackled. But those are also opportunities as well. As you know, I think one of the things that I'd love to hear from you is like, you know, having started with the very first banner ad, and looking forward to imagine a world where now we do have this federated social web. How do you see what would be if you could paint the perfect picture, you're there, you wave a magic wand on how you would ideally like to see monetization work for a open social web? What would you do with it?
John Battelle:
Well, if every if it, you know it, if we could remove an awful lot of friction, which we should not understate for purposes of this, this back and forth, let's just understate frictionless attention and frictionless commerce, attention being the standard for advertising and commerce being the standard for either subscription and or value exchange. Right, right. You could see waves of attention in waves of commerce going around, as people discovered cool shit. And this is where I think some of the mechanisms, not necessarily the current, you know, blockchains, or even blockchain itself, but the mechanisms for aggregation of value and insurance that the value exchange is appropriately audited and auditable. And manage could get really interesting, right? I remember writing a blog post in like 2004 or five, about how screwed up the news businesses, right, so here I am, you know, I'm teaching a course on how screwed up the news businesses at Northeastern next year. So like, it's only gotten worse in the last 20 years. But and saying, you know, there's really only one way we can solve for the sort of disaggregation problem of news, which is, you know, Google and others have blown apart the publication and now instead of reading the New York Times and giving them $300 a year, I read 300 Different sources every week, and I really don't remember which one and they were right. It's just like, I get pointed around and you know, that's what we all have done, and we still do in our social media feeds. But how does value accrue to the creator of that, you know, particulars is obviously a problem. You are really focused on it Flipboard well, you can have extremely high quality curatorial mechanisms and companies like Flipboard And you could have a system that was frictionless, that allowed for a small amount of value to accrue no matter where across the internet based on an understanding of person's identity, and their willingness to engage in a micro transaction. Right. And back in 2004, or five, when I wrote this blog post, I said the only place that could do this is Google, because at that time, it was the central switching board of the entire Internet. Right? And well, it's kind of still is as it relates to search, it absolutely is not as it relates to attention around the internet anymore, there's too many of them. So it would have to start from the edge and go back to the middle, which is why I think it's so important that we create a kind of independent identity that is owned and operated by each of us, because we want to, and it's not a lot of work to do. And if we can do that, the rest kind of follows. You know, there'll be a lot entrepreneurs trying to make, you know, systems that collected value on attention and distributed. Right, but they won't do it if the current roadblocks exist. Right. Right. But when you look past that, you know, block to that VISTA of where it could be and what it might be like, if you could see an amazing amount of innovation. And would there be an amazing amount of fraud and bullshit? Yes. But you know, that's the eternal problem. And opportunity of open versus closed. Yeah, you know, and you just gotta take it. Because the world out there is like, you got roads, I'm looking at a road right now my window, and you could walk down and get somewhere and you could also get hit by a car. So like, Sorry, man, that's life. Just like, make sure you walk on the side and look for the cars. You know, this is just I'd rather have an open system than be like, no, sorry, you have to wait for you know, the automated Uber to come and pick you up. Right? That like, I don't want to live in that world. I don't want to live in that world. We do kind of already live in that world in a certain number of ways. Like, you only get what Netflix wants you to see, you only see what Facebook and metal want you to see. Like, that world is terrifying to me. Yeah. And not just because oh, they know everything about you. I couldn't care less what they know about me to be honest. And most people don't. I care about the kind of world you're living in, where it's closed, it's not open. And you know, it's kind of post apocalyptic sci fi, you know, it's like you, it's not a world I want to live in, where we're choice has been taken away. And, you know, and and you're essentially an object that is being leased or rented, right? And just if so, I'm all for, you know, the stuff we've been talking about, I think, I think there is a renaissance of interesting people who want to work and think and create in this space. And it feels to me more hopeful than it has certainly for the past 15 years. Yeah,
Mike McCue:
You know, it's so interesting how this is a moment where basic first principles and common sense really matter, to determine where we're going to go from here. And you know, what an example of that is, when you just think about, you have a person who's going to tell a story. And you have people who are interested in that person's story. And they're happily willing to pay, they're happily willing to, you know, to fund that. But the massive indirection and lack of a direct relationship between an audience member and a, you know, a storyteller, or a brand for that matter, has created all of these middlemen has created all of this sort of surveillance economy, because everything happens through these indirect players. And there's no, there hasn't been a way to just directly connect with between a storyteller and an audience member or a, a brand, and a buyer of that product of for them that brand. Yeah.
John Battelle:
And that that's the thing that I think is if we can figure that out, and by the way, build that into the equivalent of the sort of Internet protocol as opposed to monetize it as a corporation. Right. Now, could corporations be first and fastest set, taking advantage of that protocol? 100%, go for it, but make it an open protocol. And I believed that, you know, back in the early 2000s, that blogs were going to be that thing, and I was wrong, as we've discussed, because he wanted to follow someone just take their RSS, right and then over time that's going to that RSS is going to build out to something that includes like, but but now we need to, you know, your absolute Right, like right now, if I want to follow somebody, I've got to, you know, maybe I, maybe I see them on Flipboard. Maybe I see them on Substack. Maybe I follow them on seven different social networks. So it's a hot holy mess it is. And and it's not. It's not sustainable, certainly from the point of view of people who are creative. And and so, you know, let's go build that.
Mike McCue:
Right. Well, and you know, your point about RSS, I think is a great one, the RSS was just a one way connection between a piece of client software not in person, and a website, right? Activity, pub, and a lot of ways is like, you can almost think of it as like an evolution of RSS, it's two way. And it's the connection between the person and the person publishing, right. And the publishing. That is a very big deal. And that's the thing that I that has gotten me so excited. How you then translate that into a user experience that makes sense. And it's simple and to understand and how you monetize and fund all that it. There's a whole host of questions. But yeah, we've never had that technology before. It's never happened at scale. Right. It was built, you know, Evan prodromou, who I've had on the podcast, and others helped create activity pop back in 2016. But you know, now with Mastodon, you know, ironically enough that, you know, what's happened with Elon and Twitter has basically created an opportunity where this technology is now being seriously considered and looked at.
John Battelle:
I think it's a big opportunity. And then there's other pieces of it that that, you know, are worth paying attention to. We just saw this week, two warnings fired over the bout of two very large platform companies, Twitter and Facebook from the EU, based on new legislation that just went into effect this year, the digital markets Act and the Digital Services Act. These are very important pieces of legislation because they create new market realities that allow for different kinds of navigation of business models. Now, yes, only in the EU. However, a lot of people there, number one, very, very big economy number two, and number three, once people get used to the new things they can do in the EU, there will be all manner of pressure subtle and not so subtle, to bring those capabilities to the United States and other markets. So I'm paying attention to that as well.
Mike McCue:
Are you writing about this?
John Battelle:
I wrote a piece about exactly what I you know, the EU is legislation last week, which my wife is kind of my first audience, right? And so she's said, she usually reads my piece. And she's like, Oh, I liked that one, or, you know, that was good, but you know, went too long, or whatever. This one, she said, I stopped reading after the first paragraph. I can't read about legislation. I'm like, Okay, I think I wouldn't the next time I write about it, and I will, I think I'll write about it in a different way. But I just felt like I had to break down the actual real legislation before I could get into the impact. But maybe I'll flip the bit and start with the impacts.
Mike McCue:
It's a hard thing to write about. But I think it's needed, I think, I think being able to sift through and evangelize regulatory changes that really could help and really could open things up versus ones that sound good or well meaning, but actually make it harder for everybody, that just make the incumbent stronger.
John Battelle:
Well that’s GDPR in a nutshell.
Mike McCue:
Exactly. CCPA, and so on.
So what are you working on now? And how should people be following along with, you know, the all the different things that you're doing these days?
John Battelle:
I'm, I'm working on, I guess you could say it's a book. It might take multiple forms before it ends up as a book. But it's been 20 years since I've really in earnest worked on a book. And in between that I was just starting companies. So I'm back to, to a book. And in the focus of the book is a lot of what we've been talking about. It's both a history of, of the commercial internet, so the past 3035 years, and an argument about what we should make next. They call it the internet we deserve as opposed to the internet we have, right? And so it's a history and an argument and the process of doing that book are, you know, will kind of take me in lots of directions, a lot of reporting, a lot of just writing out loud on my site. So people want to follow what I'm doing when I'm thinking I'll be writing up my reporting probably a couple times a week on my site, which is Battellemedia.com. And I'm also teaching at Northeastern. And I'm attached to a senator there called the Burnes Center that does a lot of work on policy and the on internet policy where I taught at Columbia policy at Columbia for the past four years. So it's an area that I find really important, if a bit dry.
Mike McCue:
I'm excited about that. That book could not come sooner. Yeah. And I'm psyched that you're putting out blog posts along the way, as you're having these realizations.
John Battelle:
Well, the more people that come and read them and argue with me about them, the better everything will get. So I know it's old fashioned now to say, you know, read my blog, but, you know, read my blog.
Mike McCue:
Now, there's a WordPress plugin to publish it via ActivityPub.
John Battelle:
I am going to install that. And I'm looking forward to seeing how that works. I mean, people can find me on Mastodon and also on threads. But I'm no longer on the dead bird site.
Mike McCue:
Nor am I. And I think I think it's really exciting to see someone with your experience and all of the things that you've done starting with the observations around the original sin and all the way through monetization, content creation, user experience, privacy, identity, all these things, you know, you're one of the few people that can I think write credibly about all of this and where it should go and what the internet should be, that we deserve. So I'm gonna queue really excited to see where this goes.
John Battelle:
It'll be a good journey. And I'll look forward to seeing how you guys, you know, I know you got a lot cooking. So good luck with all of that.
Mike McCue:
Thank you, John. Well, it was great to have you here. Thank you again for joining the podcast and just terrific conversation.
John Battelle:
Yeah, thank you.
Thanks so much for listening. You can follow John's work over at Battelle media.com.
Big thanks to our editors, Rosanna Caban, and Anh Le.
To learn more about what Flipboard is doing in the Fediverse sign up via the link in this episode's description.
You can also follow Mike McCue on Mastodon at Mike at Flipboard dot social. See you in the Fediverse!