Anil Dash

This week, many of the web's most popular sites shuttered their doors in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the pair of bills that had been winding their way through congress with the stated intent of fighting piracy and the unfortunate side effect of fundamentally threatening the web. After this concerted outburst of activism from the web community (which even extended to a first-of-its-kind offline protest by the New York Tech Meetup community), the sponsors of the bills have withdrawn their support, many undecided or former supporters of the bills changed their positions and in all, people who love the web are claiming a victory. Hooray! And it's still not too late to express your displeasure to your elected officials if you'd like to make sure they know how you feel.

But. There are a number of unanswered questions about this victory, and some important questions about what it means going forward, not just for web freedom, but for the technology community as a driver of public policy and legislation. We should start, as always with a brief look back.

Blogs Were Born To Do This

The entire modern social web was born from the blogging movement, and social activism has been part of the blogging medium since its birth. But ironically, the most common form of protest for our young medium has been self-censorship.

• One of the inarguable pioneers of blogging, Dave Winer, started his first blog as the news page of the 24 Hours of Democracy campaign. What was that about? Well, it should sound familiar — the leading voices and sites of the social web spent 24 hours protesting onerous potential legislation that they thought would significantly curtail free speech on the web. SOPA? Nope! It was the Communications Decency Act (CDA) which unified the nascent personal web sixteen years ago, and the protests that accompanied the 24 Hours of Democracy included the Blue Ribbon Campaign and the Black World Wide Web shutdown, which climaxed in an estimated 7% of all active U.S. websites changing their background colors to black in protest.
• Just a few years later, my late, lamented friend Brad Graham, who coined the word "blogosphere", also created one of the first blog-specific protests when he launched the Day Without Weblogs in 1999 in observance of World AIDS Day. Patterned after the Day Without Art, and named "Day Without Weblogs" because the word "blog" was not yet in common usage, this moving demonstration was an annual tradition for many years (eventually evolving into a more information-oriented project called "Link and Think") and carried on the social web's deep tradition of drawing attention by shutting itself down and forcing users to confront a black page. Sadly, it seems much of the early record of Day Without Weblogs has been lost since Brad's untimely passing.

Just at a cultural level, it's fascinating to me that our medium finds that the most powerful thing we can do is deny the rest of the world our voices and creations, and that this almost invariably takes the form of a black screen confronting unsuspecting, perhaps uneducated, and certainly confused non-geeky users.

How It Works

Does this form of protest work? It's hard to say — most of the CDA protests from 1996 took place after the law had already been signed. But we have some feedback on the more contemporary protests:

Seems blogosphere has succeeded in terrorizing many senators and congressmenwho previously committed.Politicians all the same.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 18, 2012

When Rupert Murdoch dog whistles "terror" about a topic, he's saying he wants some people illegally detained and tortured. So that's a good sign we had some impact.

This is a particularly stunning turn for a few reasons. First, as Bijan Sabet noted, congress members had considered SOPA and PIPA a done deal. Not "likely to pass", but "such a sure thing that I should sponsor it, even though I haven't read it and don't really understand it, so I can have my name on successful legislation".

This is especially remarkable because the tech industry sucks at 1. understanding how legislation happens 2. how legislation can impact their businesses and 3. actually responding to these issues before it's too late. John Battelle discusses this in depth, explaining "[T]he fight isn’t over. In fact, it’s only starting. And the folks who basically wrote SOPA/PIPA are pissed, and they plan on using the same tactics they always have when they don’t get what they want: They’re throwing around their money." Marco Arment continues, correctly, by stating that SOPA will keep coming back, over and over, in some form until it passes. Does that doom us to recurring bouts of black page syndrome? Maybe not.

The Infrastructure

One of the most unheralded successes of this week's SOPA and PIPA victories was the role that pioneering open government and government transparency efforts had in enabling the protests to take off. Just a few weeks ago, few online had heard of either bill, almost no one could understand their potential impact, and even fewer had read the actual bills.

But thanks to efforts like OpenCongress, which routinely creates valuable resources like this look at the money behind SOPA through its support from the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, the web was able to see who was helping pay for the law. Giving that information a place to live on the web was a fundamental step that enabled powerful demonstrations like the GoDaddy protests in which thousands of users moved their business from the company in protest of its support of SOPA. (I have some misgivings about the tactics and effectiveness of that particular protest, but overall as a first example of the organization and focus of those who would object to SOPA, it was inarguably powerful.)

Similarly, the Center for Responsive Politics powered detailed look at lobbying dollars which drove the bills, which organizations like MapLight could use to create a clear picture of how SOPA and PIPA were purchased.

Of course, I've got a dog in this fight; Expert Labs was founded specifically to conduct experiments about getting people on social networks to organize in ways that would allow them to impact policy makers. And we had some amazing successes in unexpected ways — Clay Johnson on our team educated hundreds of thousands of people on how techies can effectively engage with the policy-making processin his piece "Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works". And despite her well-earned misgivings about having a disproportionately large social network, Gina Trapani demonstrated the best potential of that network with a result that is best illustrated in a single tweet:

Thx for your input @ginatrapani on #sopa - you, and many others, have asked for our views and we've responded - bit.ly/y8ihzu

— Aneesh Chopra (@aneeshchopra) January 14, 2012

That's the CTO of the United States, Aneesh Chopra, directly thanking Gina for her honest, forceful feedback about SOPA and linking to an official White House response to a petition asking for a veto of SOPA. Despite the well-intentioned skepticism of folks like Felix Salmon in response to my admittedly optimistic visions of "#OccupyWhiteHouse", the idea that this sort of direct online feedback could have a meaningful impact was validated by none other than the Director of the White House's Office of Public Engagement:

Ever wondered if White House is taking @WeThePeople seriously? We are. This #SOPA petition made a big difference bit.ly/wWW82s

— Jon Carson (@JonCarson44) January 14, 2012

Still, amidst the web-nerd triumphalism, it's worth noting: This isn't how I thought it would work. While I've always believed in the potential of the open government and transparency movements, I predicated our work at Expert Labs on the idea that the type of large-scale, effective, (relatively) well-organized demonstrations we've seen against SOPA and PIPA online were unlikely to happen. I was, perhaps, too willing to assume that change would only happen through more traditional channels. While we've made an amazing tech platform in ThinkUp, I was trying to push it to conform to the lobbyists-and-big-dollars world of D.C. today, and this week's victory gives me hope that I was wonderfully, delightfully, completely wrong about that decision.

So Now What?

What we've gotten so far, with our SOPA and PIPA demonstrations, is a first, rough beta test of the power to impact policy online. What we don't have is the way to use this power effectively. We are missing a few key things:

1. The ability to organize for issues that aren't life-or-death for big tech players
2. The ability to clearly and quickly form communities of interest around particular issues that are complicated
3. The desire and willingness to stand up for issues that aren't simply about the self-interest or self-preservation of technology experts

This final point is my biggest concern and greatest wish for our industry. We now know we have the power bend the law to our will, and to make legislators respect our values, if we can just coordinate our efforts and focus our attentions. But there are many issues which have to do with the soul of our nation that may not galvanize a redditor who's only concerned with legislation that might interfere with watching movies online.

We have discovered that our biggest companies, our most popular sites, or most passionate communities on the web are willing to stand up and have a powerful impact on the laws that govern our country. But we're on the fence. Google's spending somewhere around $10 million dollars on old-fashioned lobbying this year. Maybe that's useful — as Clay said, we need to know how the old system works before we can reform it.

But maybe we should be darkening our sites for deeper, more profound issues. We have the ability to affect marriage equality and reproductive freedom and immigration reform and many other issues where those of us who love technology tend to have similar values regardless of which of the traditional political parties we list on our voter registrations.

This is the power we were promised the web would give us. Let's use it.

A few nice conversations around the web, either in response to or inspired by what I've been talking about here:

• My favorite TechCrunch post in a long time is Jon Evans' Scheming Intentions, which outlines a simple way that native mobile apps could take a tentative step towards re-integrating with the web.
• Shapeways, the delightful 3D printing-on-demand service wrote a deep and thoughtful response to my ideas about where 3D printing is headed. BoingBoing had a quick take on the post, too, and I found the comments entertaining.
• I liked Michael Newman's recap of his favorites from 2011, especially his ruminations on animated .gifs.
• I had a blast talking to Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt on the Triangulation show — I know spending the better part of an hour listening to me ramble is a lot, but I'm very proud of the conversation about blogging in the first half, and hope that justifies enduring this for some folks:

• A wonderful, deep look at the importance of owning your identity online, detailed by Patric King, uses the comments on my recent post about Foursquare in contrast to the comments on the piece was it was shared/republished on Facebook.
• I loved Rebecca MacKinnon's stirring TED talk asking people to take back the internet. Yes, let's!
• The fun app-as-nostalgia service Timehop has been getting some attention; Mashable's piece on the service uses my comments to demonstrate why it's meaningful.
• MetaFilter revisits the principles of having a constructive community and along the way re-legislates my advocacy around the idea that the site should do more to welcome new users.
• Finally, an interview I did for PBS's "Need to Know" was excerpted on their site; I think this brief clip highlights very well the challenge and opportunity that we see at Expert Labs to really have a positive impact on government. I don't know if and when this airs in various locales, but hopefully this gives you a feel for the ideas.

Watch Fixing Government: Anil Dash on a social media revolution for Congress on PBS. See more from Need to Know.

About two years ago, Fred Wilson and I were talking about which startups we found interesting and I mentioned offhandedly that Foursquare was far and away the one that I thought had the most potential to be a huge, meaningful business. I'm sure Fred (and Union Square Ventures) had many other people recommend Foursquare to them both before and after that day, and of course their subsequent investment proved that Foursquare was compelling to the USV team. But at that point, it was still early enough in Foursquare's evolution that Fred was surprised both at the vehemence of my optimism for the young company (which at the time still consisted of just Dennis and Naveen) as well as how casually I just assumed they'd be a huge success. At the time, I hadn't really critically considered why I was so bullish on the company, I just knew at a gut level that it had a ton of potential.

Two years later, what seemed like unformed potential has blossomed into truly impressive execution: Foursquare is the one startup that's doing the most remarkable job of any company out there in product strategy and product creation. Though they've obviously gotten a lot of attention for their success, I think some of the nuances of what they're pulling off have remained non-obvious, and wanted to document what's interesting far beyond the amount of dollars of venture capital funding they've amassed.

Of note: I don't have any stake in Foursquare except in some broad sense that I want NYC startups to succeed, I like that the company is independent of big companies like Facebook, and I'm friends with a number of folks at the company (including the founders) and would be pleased to see them do well. Also, I'm going to describe some of the things that they're doing from my perspective as an educated outsider to the company — I haven't talked to anyone at Foursquare about this post, so it may not reflect every detail of what they've pulled off, but hopefully the spirit is correct and Foursquare folks can respond in the comments or on their blogs to correct any inaccuracies.

What's the big deal?

• Core Platform: The first, and perhaps most fundamental, brilliance in Foursquare's product execution is the recognition of the ubiquity of geolocation features in mobile platforms and the identification of declarations of place as a form of establishing identity online. While much has been made about the gamification aspect of Foursquare's design, I actually don't think that's the biggest innovation responsible for the platform's success; Identifying when small incremental improvements to hardware have enabled a profound and fundamental improvement to software capabilities is the sort of thing that's usually the exclusive province of companies like Apple and Microsoft, and yet Foursquare's pulled that off out of the gate.
• Reliable Iteration: Foursquare's removed features from the core app a few times, constantly changes the design of its flagship iOS application, and in general asserts its authority over the experience that users have within the Foursquare application. Yet, unlike every single other major social application, they don't inspire mass user revolts or negative press every time they iterate. Some of this is that they practice WWIC 101, vetting ideas with actual users as they begin to test them, including the very key fact that the company's founders are very public, visible, and enthusiastic users of the service itself, ensuring not just an attention to detail but a deep fluency in the application's limits and shortcomings as well. But part of this is the small, well-paced timing of iteration on the application where there are always small things changing in ways that aren't wildly disruptive, but do enough to set a tone that users know to expect the furniture might get rearranged once in a while. This type of iteration is extremely difficult to balance well, and it underpins the other successes outlined here.
• Technical Competence: Foursquare's slow sometimes, and I never know if failures in the app are due to something on Foursquare's part or due to the vagaries of an AT&T connection in Manhattan. This is a great thing. Pushing areas of uncertainty to known points of failure where users already expect some frustration takes away a lot of the antagonism that people would otherwise feel towards Foursquare if its technical errors were clearly just Foursquare's fault. Just as importantly, new features are introduced across all platforms simultaneously, and they consistently work at scale even as Foursquare's user base rapidly increases in number. These kinds of successes are extremely difficult to pull off at scale, and are usually only visible when they fail. In this category, no news is good news, and unlike Twitter or Flickr or Tumblr or other services which preceded Foursquare as the "hot" social startup of the moment, Foursquare doesn't even have a signature "failure" message like the Fail Whale or "Is Having A Massage".
• Design Innovation: Mari Sheibley's signature design style has defined Foursquare's public face since its earliest days, and the entire design team at Foursquare has maintained a design aesthetic that's distinctive and playful without being cloying, in support of an interaction model that's surprisingly clear given the depth of features that the platform supports. For example, I don't really pay any attention to the points-and-leaderboard part of the service, and despite the richness of functionality available around those features, I never have to see them since they're tucked away under one tab in the iOS app. Similarly, while Lists invite an interesting form of discovery, I'm only gradually engaging with the feature, and the architecture of the app supports dipping into this area without resorting to the "here's a blinking light you need to dismiss" prompts of analogous features like the "Discover" tab in the new Twitter client for iOS. More fundamentally, an incredibly rich information model is represented consistently and elegantly across the app on all its platforms, even though displaying just a simple list of what my friends are up to incorporates elements including avatars, nicknames, mayoralty indicators, place names, location data, time/date information, live maps, comment boxes, and icons indicating venue types. Keeping information this dense while also having it be comprehensible and flexible enough to accommodate constant feature iteration is a formidable challenge, made all the more impressive by having a design language that's consistent across different resolutions and platforms, and still distinct enough to be recognizable when it's applied more broadly. Put another way: Foursquare's design is fun enough that I'd fully expect to see hipsters wearing Foursquare-themed ironic tees by springtime, and very few brands that are only two years old have enough visual identity to be worth parodying that quickly.
• Thoughtful Business Model: The single biggest prompt for me to write this post was the sheer jaw-dropping impressiveness of the Small Business Saturday promotion that Foursquare pulled off in conjunction with American Express on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. While it's obvious that any company that you voluntarily give information about your location and shopping habits to should be able to build a meaningful business out of that data, there are still a million ways that incorporating those business opportunities into an app could be screwed up in a way that'd be permanently off-putting to users. But Foursquare didn't just avoid those traps -- this very young company delivered a unique new ecommerce integration built into their platform that 1. Shipped on time for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend 2. Functioned properly across all platforms for millions of users 3. Didn't wildly disrupt the existing uses of the app 4. Provided meaningful financial incentives (a $10 credit) to actually use the new features 5. Provided a meaningful social justification for the new features by encouraging support for local businesses 6. Was easy enough to use that signing up basically involved quick one-time entry of a credit card number and 7. Seamlessly interacted with a partner's complex financial systems (who knows what kind of APIs American Express provides to partners?) in a way that was so seamless as to be invisible. While a few users tweeted about liking the promo, from the standpoint of a startup executing on an ambitious product vision, this was an absolute tour de force, and one of the most impressive product launches I've ever seen a small company pull off.
• Meaningful APIs: One of the great things about Foursquare's APIs is that they don't just give other companies the opportunity to plug in to Foursquare's data, they support the creation of experiences that are actually meaningful. Just one example is articulated well in this piece on digital nostalgia, showing how the wonderful Timehop has built a thoughtful and evocative experience on top of the Foursquare API, simply by reminding us of where we've been in the past. I expect people will be making apps that are as valuable as they are meaningful in short order, as well.

What's it mean?

While there may be individual companies that have out-executed Foursquare in these individual areas, the combination of the team's relatively small size, the growth rate in the user base, and the consistency of execution across all of these areas while also growing the company as a whole is incredibly impressive. Particularly important to me is that everyone from Dennis and Naveen on down within the company speaks about the vision that they have for what Foursquare can become, as opposed to short-term thinking or resting on the (not inconsiderable) hype that's been lavished on the company.

I point out this success for selfish reasons, too — I'd love to see more companies that both remain independent of the big players in the tech industry while staying focused on creating meaningful, large-scale products that aren't just simple features. The breadth of successes that Foursquare's had recently also point out to the fundamental wisdom they had in choosing not to be part of a bigger company like Facebook, as Facebook's own failures in this area stand in stark contrast, despite their advantages in scale, money, developers and resources.

But perhaps most importantly, I think we need more stories that celebrate the success of what seem like small, iterative product launches, but actually reflect triumphs in unsung disciplines such as systems operations, design process, business development and product management. There are lots of loud, pointless headlines about companies getting money from venture capitalists or angel investors. What I'd love to see more of in 2012 (and beyond!) is headlines about how a few small successes with users are a demonstration of a small company outperforming and out-innovating the biggest companies in the tech industry by being focused and disciplined in their execution. That, actually, is my most favorite Foursquare feature.

I've been infatuated with 3D printing for a few years now; the rise of (NYC's own!) MakerBot and other startups offering simple ways to create physical objects as easily as we create paper output from our computers is extraordinarily exciting. I have no doubt that, in a few years, you'll be able to go to Best Buy on Black Friday and when you buy a new computer, they'll throw in a 3D printer for free.

But that being said, I don't think we're on the path to widespread adoption and success for 3D printers yet, and while I've had this conversation with Bre at MakerBot as well as some other influential folks in the space, I thought I'd jot down my notes as a sort of wishlist for where I hope the 3D fabrication and printing world is headed.

• Stop Making Altairs: You know that famous mugshot of Bill Gates? It was taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico, not in Redmond or Silicon Valley or any other tech center. Know why? Because that was where Microsoft was founded. And Microsoft was founded there so that it could be close to MITS, makers of the Altair, the first broadly successful personal computer to be sold. Well, actually, it wasn't a computer — it was a kit to build a computer. (You can still buy a version of the kit.) It wasn't until other manufacturers (notably Apple, with its first computer) started to integrate these pieces into being more finished products and less do-it-yourself kits that larger adoption of personal computers took off. Today, most 3D printing hardware feels closer to a kit that needs to be assembled than it does to a finished product, and even though you can order pre-assembled devices, the fit-and-finish of the hardware hasn't made the leap that Apple did between the Apple I and the Apple II. I'm sure this will happen soon, but it's the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of 3D printing, now that costs have come down.

• The Teleporter: Every 3D printer should seamlessly integrate a 3D scanner, even if it makes the device cost much more. The reason is simple: If you set the expectation that every device can both input and output 3D objects, you provide the necessary fundamentals for network effects to take off amongst creators. But no, these devices are not "3D fax machines". What you've actually made, when you have an internet-connected device that can both send and receive 3D-printed objects, is a teleporter. I know that sci-fi nerds will point out that this is hardly teleportation, since you're cloning the shape of the original object rather than actually sending the original object somewhere. But sci-fi correctness is not nearly as useful for the 3D printing industry as a totally futuristic concept that can get normal people excited. Imagine a simple television ad with a clean, well-designed (not a kit!) device saying "when you lose the wheel for your kid's toy car, her friend can teleport her a replacement".
• A Service, Not An Ink Scam: Today, printing in 2D sucks. It doesn't work, and when it does, it just obligates you to waste tons of money on consumables like ink and toner, which the printer companies rip you off for. On top of that, printer companies are among the worst when it comes to building super-complicated Printer Management Suites that install tons of stupid software on your computer that does nothing useful, instead of simply enabling you to generate output. There's a chance to leave that behind with 3D printing. Buying these new, consumer-friendly teleporters could simply have a fixed monthly (or yearly, or lifetime) cost which includes all of the consumables that are needed to run the device. Now, this isn't cheap — the plastics and materials that are used in forming 3D objects are pretty expensive today. But what's worse than them being expensive is that they're a pain in the ass to find. You can't buy them at Staples. So instead, smart simple software that comes with your teleporter should know when you're low on teleportation ink, and just automatically send you a replacement cartridge. Do a quick estimation of how much the average user will use in consumables for the year, and bundle the cost into the device, or offer it as a simple subscription. These are going to be premium products at first, and that's okay!
• Stay Connected: As implied by the fact that teleportation ink would be automatically reordered from the manufacturer, the new generation of devices has to be connected to the Internet in smarter ways! First, each device should automatically share the 3D plans for whatever's being printed with all the other owners of the device, unless someone marks their creation as private. That way, the default is for objects that are printed or teleported to be available for remixing, right from the start — it's a lot easier to modify someone else's 3D creation than it is to make one from scratch. Second, these teleporters should have a simple way (maybe just an email address?) for your friends who also own the device to send you their creations — a physical, but still digital, inbox. I had always thought of this as a great way for people to have a sort of "Christmas morning" experience every day as they see what their friends have sent them overnight, and I think the reaction of those of us who've been excited about BERG's Little Printer has really proven the potential of that idea.
• Printing Powers Platforms: The other evening, I tweeted about my nostalgia for old dot-matrix printers. The physicality of the devices, their longevity, and the fact that some key models are still being sold virtually unchanged in form nearly two decades after their introductions demonstrate just some of the virtues of these old workhorses. They've persisted for one key reason: The way they physically impact the page makes them uniquely well suited to a lot of industrial and business applications — you can't make multiple carbon copies of a page on a laser printer. But there's a far more subtle, and interesting underpinning to why industrial and line-of-business applications were made to run with these printers in the first place. About twenty years ago, most mainstream commercial application developers were making the transition from DOS to Windows. And, aside from the usability advantages of the GUI and the new marketing power Microsoft brought to bear in promoting the whole ecosystem, one of the most pragmatic reasons to make the shift was simply so that software developers wouldn't have to create their own print drivers. In the DOS world, printing was a problem every developer had to solve from scratch when making an application. Standardization and efficiencies around printing were one of the first huge platform advantages that helped shift developer momentum to Windows, but today no mainstream platform has even remotely standardized on interfaces for sending 3D print jobs (or teleportation tasks) to a device. It may be too early for those standards to be defined right now, but once one platform gets them right, it may be a killer app for a loyal and deep-pocketed audience.

Obviously, I've got lots of thoughts on where 3D printing (and teleporting!) are headed, but these capture some of the ideas that have been knocking around my head the longest, and I really wanted to see what those who know more about the space think about their feasibility or correctness — I've never even owned a 3D printer! More broadly, I'm hoping those who are deep into 3D printing will see that it's still very, very early days, and there are huge improvements to be made in everything from the user experience to the business ecosystem to the marketing and explanations of these products, all of which could combine to make something truly magical.

And as just one parting example of why this stuff's exciting, I loved this video from The Verge, showing how Microsoft's hardware group (long one of the company's undersung overperformers) makes smart use of 3D printing in their everyday work:

Related Reading

• Recognizing the Maker Movement
• Make the Revolution
• Obliquely related, from six years ago, recommendations on Beating the iPod and iTunes