On Thursday, right after failing to get a root canal for the Xth time (saga here), I participated in a square-table discussion (because that was its geometry) titled “How to Make Money in News: New Business Models for the 21st Century — An Executive Session sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy”, hosted by Harvard’s JFK School of Government. My panel was this:

It was a good one, and it was fun sharing the table sides (since there was no stage) with such bright and interesting folks.

Nicco kindly let me speak last since I was fighting major tooth pain at the time and wanted a few minutes for the Tylenol to kick in. Others present said I made sense. But I didn’t pull my various threads together since I kinda ran ahead of myself. So I thought this morning it would be good to share what I tried to say, drawing from the outline I wrote on the pad kindly provided by the organizers there, and which I kept. Here goes…

Let’s start a quarter-millennium ago, with The Enlightenment, the ideas of which were applied by the framers of our republic. The Enlightenment’s value system elevated the principles of liberty, freedom, self-reliance, personal rights, and reason, among others. As a movement, it was suspended when industry won the industrial revolution, which, among other things, created the modern corporation. By “modern” I mean big, or wannabe big. (Although the East India Company was big enough to deserve the Boston Tea Party in 1773.) Think railroads, oil companies, car companies, phone companies… and media companies, starting with newspapers.

The industrial system was this pyramid-shaped top-down arrangement of power and process that changed us from individual craftspeople to workers in a system that subordinated our originality to positions we occupied in org charts. Check your surname for evidence of some ancestor’s craft. Baker, for example. Or Merchant, Miller, Weaver, Tanner or Cooper. Nobody today names themselves, or their kids, “Joe Middlemanager,” “Mary Drillpressoperator,” or “Bill Webdesigner.” Collective power was all. This was believed by both the capitalist system and the communist and socialist thinkings that opposed it.

In the industrial system, nearly all original thinking, invention, and innovation took place within corporate walls. Governments, colleges, and universities did some origination too. The system still encompassed everything, subordinating the individual to larger corporate entities.

This was not a Bad Thing; it was just how things worked. And it did lots of good. In the area of communications—our concern here today—this gave us magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, and a phone system that was smart in the middle and dumb at the ends. Innovations by the phone giants included touch-tone dialing, the Princess Phone, the RJ-11 jack, call waiting, and message recording, all rolled out slowly over a span of about forty years.

Near the beginning of that stretch, in 1959, Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker”. By then Drucker had already forecast the end of the modern corporation and had compared management (his specialty) to conducting a band or an orchestra of self-empowered individuals, each good at what they do, and eager to learn more and improve. He said companies existed at the sufferance of the individuals who comprised them, even as they organized their work and put it to use.

By late in the last century, the knowledge workers who mattered most were geeks. Engineers. Programmers. These were the people who gave us the Internet, the PC, and now hand-held Internet devices that still do old-fashioned telephony—along with a zillion other things. The most effective geeks worked independently, within their organizations, on their own, or both.

Consider the differences between the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF. While the former governs its member companies and government bodies through complex and slow bureaucratic procedures, the latter uses a “request for comment” system that results in operative good-enough standards based on “rough consensus and running code”. The differences illustrate how the phone system never could have created the Internet, and geeks did exactly that, and then some.

Does anybody know when we first started talking about open source? The answer is February 1998. That’s when Eric S. Raymond (ESR) posted a short instructional missive titled “Goodbye, ‘free software’; hello, ‘open source“. In it he explained why Free Software, long in use as a term and accounting for much success in the computing realm, was not going to make good enough sense to businessfolk, and why a crew of fellow geeks was going to make the world talk about open source instead.  Look up open source, and you’ll now get 73 million results, give or take.  (In no small way this was the direct result of Eric’s charisma. I’ve watched him hold crowds of fellow geeks in thrall while pacing the stage and holding forth for more than three hours at a time. Chris Locke called him “a rhetorician of the first water.” In the midst of this work, ESR also put out some of the strongest and most durable writing, including The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which now amounts to canon.)

Thanks to its founding geeks, the Internet embodies a principle called end-to-end. Among other things, it assumes that the bulk of intelligence—and the kind that matters most—resides at the ends of the network, with people and the devices serving them, rather than in the middle, where the phone companies used to be, back when they thought, as old-fashioned formerly modern industrial companies, that most of the network’s intelligence should reside, and make decisions for everybody.

The end-to-end principle provides an environment for creation and contribution that is radical, profound, and beyond huge. As applied ideas go, it’s as big as the invention of movable type, or bigger. It’s also our new environment: we live on the Internet now. And it is here that we can pick up where The Enlightenment left off, enjoying boundless ways to apply enlightenment virtues (along with, to be fair and complete, bad activities as well: as Kim Cameron once put it, the sure sign of a good idea is that it’s easy to find bad uses for it.) The Internet supports *dynamism in the extreme, both for individuals and for whatever gatherings they form.

So now to journalism.

Big newspapers, big magazines, big radio, big TV… these are industrial-age creatures. Some will persist in the new age that is coming upon us. But they will need to adapt to a networked environment where everyone can write, perform, publish and produce.

This environment will be with us for millennia to come. So think of today as a moment in the early paleozoic, say in Cambrian time. Here, Facebook is a trilobite. Twitter is a bryzoan. The Huffington Post is a primitive sponge. For small-j journalism, this is not the End of Time, but the beginning of a new eon (not merely an epoch or age). Will big-J journalism survive? Only if it adapts. While some of that adaptation will be corporate, the leadership won’t be in the corporate system. It will be among the journalists themselves. Just as it was, and still is, with technology companies, the geeks they employ, and the individuals they still demean with the label “users.” Each of us will be far more than that, especially if dynamism is what best characterizes this new eon.

Bonus links:

Dan Gillmor‘s The Only Journalism Subsidy We Need is Bandwidth.

Edward Younkins‘ review of *The Future and its Enemies, by Virginia Postrel.

Evolution Going Great, Reports Trilobite, in The Onion.