digital

David Galbraith has a long history as an entrepreneur. A former architect for Norman Foster, he founded or co-founded Curations, Yelp, Moreover, Origins Network while also co-writing the specifications of RSS 1.0.

At Lift11, David will explain the big trends he sees developing in the digital world, a provocative talk sure to trigger reactions among the audience when he says that the long tail is dead or that there is a huge fight brewing between telcos and internet services providers.

David Galbraith

Chairman
Samba
» View Lift11 speakers

Laurent Haug: What is the most important trend in the digital world right now?

David Galbraith: A significant percentage of the world's money disappeared. It could be like the 1970s - minus the good music - or it could be like the 1930s. Technologies are getting people to talk and exchange like never before. It could make things worse, but if you believe in democracy, you have to believe that the more people talk, the more chances we have for a positive outcome. The green revolution in Iran - which was facilitated by twitter - or the coup d'état that was prevented by SMS in the Philippines, this shows that people are using technologies for the better. There is a lot of self emerging good. The internet works like that. Take a system like chatroulette, it is full of crap but the most popular image we have of it is Merton the guy playing piano. You could somehow sense a certain relief that this technology ended up being used positively.

You will also talk about the upcoming war: people vs algorithms

Yes. Google is imposing algorithms on us. Google or Google News have no human intervention. The Google car can drive itself without a human being behind the wheel. Some companies are trying to replace people with algorithms, but I think it is a ridiculous idea. The internet is a communication network, it needs people in it. That is Google's weak spot, what they are trying to do is fundamentally against the DNA of the internet.

I search for a pizza, I find an aggregated value that is becoming meaningless because it is based on 500 reviews from anonymous people. I have no relationship to them. Day to day, we have 2-3 people influencing our behaviour, and the internet will give us the possibility to recreate that. This is what Facebook wants to do: they are about people, and they clash frontally with the model of Google. Like all good battles, it will be fought on a fundamental level. It's really algorythms vs people, the next big war on the web.

Another big change ahead?

The death of the long tail. The idea behind the long tail is that all the little guys are worth more than the big guys. But mediums do one thing: they amplify celebrity. Since Rudolph Valentino, the world's stars have always been bigger than all the little guys. The phenomena has been amplified by the internet. An artist like Lady Gaga is generating petabytes of data download for Google, Justin Biber is accounting for 3% of Twitter's servers infrastructure. The point is that the internet is a place where the rich get richer. It is a story nobody wants to hear but it is true. The left part of the long tail - the one with the big guys - is bigger than the right part - the smaller guys. This is not getting better, also because of global competition that forced a merger of niches.

Now is a provocative idea: if you take Lady Gaga's downloads and charge them at the SMS rate, it would result in charging 10.5 trillion dollars to customers... A single itunes video would cost more than a million dollars.

Does that mean there is a problem with the way we charge and pay for data?

Yes. There is a fight brewing about the way we carry data. We have two business models competing right now. The internet is like a road: normally you don't pay toll unless it is a really fancy road, there are shops where you can stop and spend your money, advertisements asking for your attention. For the phone, it is like the railway network: you get on a train, everything is controlled by the train company and you pay a ticket to ride. That created this situation where Lady Gaga gets a free ride and generates traffic for which she does not pay. Why isn't she paying? Something's got to give there.

Where is this going? I don't know. But the telcos own the infrastructure so they have the power. And we can expect changes, especially because of videos that are generating more mobile traffic that telcos will try to charge users for.

Another official request from LIFT art director…to all participants!!

LIFT is not only about digital bits. Share with the lift community the message that touched you most last year in your online environments. Copy-paste the touching message, post, author or comment and send it to editor@liftconference.com We will then print a magazine during the conference!

Digital content is very fragile and can easily be corrupted, copied or altered, and because we believe in the value of printed materials as a good way to keep a track of an experience like LIFT, we decided to print, during the conference, various booklets, simply printed and binded. For visual thinkers like us, the booklet is also a good way to show drawings and photos in a better quality than on a screen, also to use, for example, the fontself project and to question some ideas…big ideas from our speakers! These booklets are part of a collection which content will be published together in a more sophisticated book….oh yeahhh…one day will get there!

This project began during LIFT07. Not so empty book is part of “Artist’s Work in Progress Projects”, supported by Swiss Conféderation , Office Féderal de la Culture, sitemapping. more projects here: http://www.letearoom.ch

Time to muse a bit here on this corner of the blogosphere, this corner of Switzerland. I am sitting here and pondering a few embryonic ideas for an interactive workshop at lift08. Here are some of these ideas:

- The Art of Digital Identity
- The Business of Freedom
- Speed, Time, Money and Sex (I can not be serious about this, can I?)
- Waiting for Godot on the Matrix
- What happens when a Transhumanist meets Calvin?

What do you think?
What is it that as a lift08 participant you want to spend a few hours exploring?