Jimmy Wales Keynote Global INET, April 23, 2012 Geneva, Switzerland Key highlight: Wales predicts the Hollywood film industry will be displaced soon. Hollywood will be destroyed. And nobody will notice much, outside nostalgia. Slides with audio: http://www.livestream.com/inet1/video?clipid=pla_f660ce02-86f1-4c12- bd15-63f8bbf9b638 Wales Keynote: Let s put things in perspective. Twenty years from now is 2032. Twenty years ago was 1992. So what does this mean? There are major changes, but unless we hit a technological singularity we can have a clue. If we sat down and were on the Internet in 1992 a lot of what we see today was at least plausibly forecastable. Not everything, but a fair amount of it. So I think we have some possibilities. I have come up with, essentially, two predictions, and I thought I would be allowed, since I have been asked to do something impossible and predict the future, I will do one safe one and one more- speculative one. Massive connectivity causes global change The safe prediction is massive connectivity. What I mean by this is just as simple as the number of people online, but I want to talk to you a little bit about what s going on today and some of the things that some people, even people in this room, may not have noticed about what s going on with connectivity. Today, depending on whose numbers you trust, there s about 2 billion people who have access to this Internet. What this means is that basically the easy parts are done. We have the U.S. and Europe and Japan and basically all of the wealthy countries online. A lot more countries are coming online all the time, increasingly. When I think about it in terms of my work, when I put it into the context of my work, the vision statement for Wikipedia is to imagine a world in which every person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. This is a pretty big task, and when we think that only 2 billion people are online we obviously have a long way to go to make that happen. So, here s what you know. I travel a lot. I speak to a lot of people. Not necessarily Internet- savvy people. I talk to CEOs of big companies, I talk to volunteers, I talk to all kinds of people all around the world. The one thing that people do if you start talking to them about the Internet in Africa this is what they say, they ll cite this kind of story (shows a headline from the UK Guardian in his PowerPoint, with the headline Mobiles Give Africa s Farmers the Chance to Set Out Their Stall ), and they say, Oh, yes, I have heard of this. People using mobile phones in Africa will be able to text somewhere and find out the price of crops and then they can deliver the crops to the place with the
highest price and then their income will go up and this is a really wonderful, amazing thing. Well, that s true enough. There are things like that going on, but I think that way of thinking about what s going on with the Internet in Africa I m singling out Africa, but we could generalize this to many, many different places in the world I think this clouds the mind, because there s probably a lot more going on than that. Here s what you probably don t know. You do know you imagine that people are just doing very primitive things. What you probably don t know This phone (takes a smartphone out of his pocket and shows the audience) is my phone. I use this phone every day when I m in the UK, which is most of the time. A friend of mine picked this phone up for me in Kenya. It s an unlocked phone, so no contract. He just brought me the phone, I stuck in my sim card, I was off to the races. It is an Android phone and has full capability with apps. If you have an iphone, it does more or less everything your iphone does. The screen s not quite as good. It s a little bit smaller, but it functions I ll tell you one thing, compared to every other smartphone I ve had in the last several years, the great thing about it is the battery actually lasts longer than one day, which is a bit of a miracle. This phone has become incredibly popular. This is for sale in Kenya. They have sold I have seen conflicting figures as many as 350,000 of these in Kenya at the price point of $80. This is amazing. So when you think about projects like the famous $100 laptop or some of the things that are going on like that, what s coming on really really fast is real smartphone technology at an affordable price. Obviously we re not reaching the poorest of the poor yet, but when you think that a phone of this capability has gone from a price of $800 down to $80 in a very short period of time how much longer does it take before something is available for $40, $20, $8, essentially affordable by almost everyone? Let s just take a look at just one country, Nigeria, to look at the growth of the Internet there. In 2000, 0.1 percent of the country was online these are the ITU numbers; 2006, 3.1 percent; 2009, 16.1 percent; and 2011, 29 percent. So the kind of growth we all remember from the dot- com boom days is happening right now in Africa. If you look at the bandwidth and I chose Nigeria, the reason I chose Nigeria, it s a bit of an unfair country to choose because it is one of the points that the undersea cables are being dropped in from Europe they had 72 megabits per second in January of 2002, 693 megabits in 07, and by the end of 2012 they expect 12 terabits of connectivity dropped into Nigeria. This is an astonishing thing which is leading to although there are a lot of problems across Africa, as we ve seen things in many many places with monopoly telecoms and the competition s not quite there, potential regulation and so forth but we are beginning to see a crash in the price of backbone Internet access which is going to lead to cheaper retail and so forth and more and more people coming online.
(Shows a slide with bandwidth rates being compared) For fun, a friend of mine asked me to test (the connection rate) at the same time he has normal broadband in New York and he was getting 8.38 and I was sitting in Lagos, Nigeria and I got 9.33 megabits (per second), and look at my upload speed 11 while he was getting.95. So I thought I was better off in Lagos, Nigeria, than in New York City. Now let s be completely fair about this. This is actually, you know, the report from Speed Test.net says this is faster than 98 percent of the Internet in Nigeria and that s absolutely true. I was at a fancy hotel right at the point where the cables dropped in from the sea. This kind of bandwidth is not common in Nigeria, however, it exists. It is real bandwidth, it is really there and it s a matter of it being more and more distributed. What are people doing on the Internet across Africa? Are they searching for prices for crops? Are they reporting malaria outbreaks? This is always the kind of do- gooder things that we re all excited about on the Internet. Yeah, sure, maybe they re doing some things like that, but what they re actually doing is they are on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, local newspapers. So, what are they doing online? They re doing exactly the same thing that we re doing. This is the mental shift I want people to have. If you re thinking of the Internet in the developing world and you re thinking about this do- gooder, development model, great. All that kind of stuff is going to happen, it is happening, but there s something else really really interesting. If you think forward 20 years about massive connectivity to the real Internet for hundreds of millions of people just in Africa keep in mind these people don t necessarily speak English or French. The era when we can assume, say, in India India is a good example for many, many years in India you could assume that anyone with a computer and was on the Internet pretty much spoke English; this is no longer true there. The same thing is true today in Africa pretty much everyone using a computer speaks either English or French. This is going to change very very rapidly. When we think about my work (shows the Wikipedia mission statement on the PowerPoint and reads) imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge we ve always been extremely linguistically diverse. Because I was going to Nigeria I went and checked up on how the languages were doing across Africa. Yoruba, one of the languages of Nigeria, now has 29,891 Wikipedia articles. This is pretty amazing to me. I had not been paying attention to Yoruba. That has more than doubled in the last year. As we get that connectivity coming in, people immediately start working, start doing things in their own languages, and this is just part of the natural evolution. They are doing exactly the same kind of things that we did, which is they start working on their Wikipedia. Swahili, 23,000; Afrikaans, 22,000. The truth is, beyond these three languages most of the languages of Africa are very very tiny. We have maybe a thousand articles in two or three more languages and the rest are very tiny, so there is a long way to go, but the numbers I m seeing as far as masses of people coming online convince me that it s almost time, that it s going to start happening very very quickly.
So the conclusion of all this is that the story of the Internet in Africa in the next 20 years is not a story about charity, not a story about subsistence farmers, not a story about SMS. What it is, it s a story about normalization and joining the global conversation. It s about a rising middle class. No one will notice when Hollywood dies So now here s my prediction two, a little more speculative and a little more challenging: No one will notice when Hollywood dies. It actually might be optimistic from my perspective what I m hoping to see in the world, but this is where I begin to predict what is unpredictable, what is the next big Apps, what are the next things coming. So, for prediction two: We re going to see large- scale collaborative communities will do to storytelling and filmmaking what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica. Hollywood will be destroyed. And nobody will notice much, outside nostalgia. Let s go through and talk a little bit about the sequence of how Wikipedia was created. I m seeing some similarities right now in video. I first came up with the idea of a free encyclopedia for everyone and created a project called Nupedia. Same vision a free encyclopedia for everybody but we didn t really have the understanding of social communities online and so forth so it was a very top- down model, more academic than Britannica. Seven- stage review process to get anything published. And this failed. One of the reasons it failed is that although many people were excited (about it) by the time we moved to the Wikipedia model there were something like 5,000 people on our email mailing lists and things who had signed up for the project, had a user account, but they were too intimidated by the system to write. It was too hard to get involved. Volunteers were inspired and wanted to help, but we put up so many barriers to them being able to help that it didn t work. So we learned about the concept of the wiki. The wiki is not something I invented. It was first invented by a guy named Ward Cunningham. The interesting thing here is that he invented the first wiki in 1995 six years before the founding of Wikipedia and all of the technology for Wikipedia existed those six years. We had the Web browser, Web server, database those things are much older, but even the concept of a wiki, of a website anyone can edit, which is a very simple concept in one sense but Ward Cunningham had to think it up that all existed for six years and it was functional and online and yet I would say Wikipedia is not a technological innovation, it s a social innovation. The older wiki communities tended to hide from search engines. There was a belief if you let too many people come and visit your wiki they would destroy it, and actually with good cause some of the earliest wikis were almost like performance art
in a sense. You know how on Wikipedia if you click on the history you can go back and see every version of the article in the past. Many of the original wikis, there was no history, so if you changed something, usually they kept two or three versions, if you changed something, if a malicious person came and made three edits to a page and wiped the page out you actually lost things. I remember reading one person s eloquent essay about Can something as fragile as this really survive? The answer s pretty much, No. We said, Let s save all of the history, and that made the wiki much more robust. People needed time to learn to build the social mechanisms (to use wikis well). Nobody really quite knew how you could bring a community together a mainly beneficial community, positive community really trying to build something for the common good, not just to generate into spam and flame wars and so forth. So now I m taking a look at the same kind of concept in regard to video. Other than a few hints here and there video is in the same state today that text was in 1999. What I mean by that is YouTube might as well be Geocities. How many people remember Geocities? It was a free homepage provider. For masses of people who came online it was the first real chance people had to put up their own Web page, and I remember one of the inspirations for Wikipedia, and there were many, there was this really fabulous Beatles fan page. A guy had written like 50 pages all about the Beatles and it was almost sort of a classic thing you would see on Geocities on the front page of a site, I m sorry I haven t updated lately. I promise I will. And that would be dated two years prior. When you have individual people working on projects they move away from it. They did the Beatles for a while, they got tired of it. They moved on. It s fun but it s mainly individual contribution. That s important. Another thing I want to you to think about in thinking about the future of video and the Internet is an analogy to tennis and chess. The greatest tennis players tend to start at a very young age. The same thing for the greatest chess players. To be really really skilled at something does take a lot of effort a lot of time, really a native fluency with the technology. When I was a kid it was insanely expensive to produce home video, so no kids were able to touch it. We couldn t even take pictures with a camera. Later we had a few bucks and my mom would let me take some pictures, but in terms of what kids are able to do today, it s completely different. My daughter is 11 years old. She has an HD camera, she s had it for quite some time now. She has social competencies on the Internet that only the most tech- savvy adults have. So, they have cameras from a very young age. My daughter, I came here mainly to brag about my daughter. She won the local county award for her video editing last year and basically she just used imovie and frankly her movie about how to train a cat is not going to win an Academy Award, but the editing was much better than what I could do because I ve never bothered to become fluent in imovie. The point is, the kids coming up today are very fluent in all of this.
Here s the magic. Right now the question is - much like Wikipedia, for which the technology existed for six years before anybody really put it all together to build something huge I want to ask what technologies right now exist like wiki was for text six years before the world takes notice? What s going on right now with young people online who are playing with video, who are doing all kinds of different things that hasn t coalesced into anything coherent or that any of us would recognize and say, Wow, that is really huge. Also, if we tie predictions one and two together mainly in prediction one I talked about the growth of broadband in the developing world and that means the next couple of billion people having the Internet access that we have, but the other aspect of that is that as we re rolling out broadband to poorer places in the world we ll be rolling out nearly unthinkable to us pre- historic types bandwidth to teenagers in wealthy countries. I recently caught myself thinking about, how much bandwidth do you need to stream video in real- time, ie from Netflix, well, I can do that now, and I thought, how much bandwidth do I really need, why would I possibly want to be able to upload 10 video streams at once from home? Well, that s because I m an old man who s not thinking about collaboratively sharing with all my teenage friends some video project that we re working on, that we can work with as fluidly as we are working with text or jpeg images or what have you. So, what does all this mean? The young people of today, my 11- year- old, they ll be 22 before we know it. Twice her age now. She s already spent about 7 years on the Internet, she s quite fluent, by 22 she ll be very very fluent. These communities of people this is where I m going out on a limb I m predicting that communities of people I m saying they re going to be young because I m not gonna do it, could be anybody in this room if you get busy and keep up with what the kids are doing are going to come together and produce Hollywood- and better- quality films collaboratively. Using large- scale CGI they re going to be able to film with local actors, put in explosions and spaceships and whatever it is they need to do and these will become more popular than Hollywood[- produced films], and these will be produced much as Wikipedia is produced, at very low cost with just a bit of facilitation from various services online and it s going to destroy the business model of Hollywood. Never mind the question of piracy, which is a huge problem I m actually more sympathetic than you might think to the issue of piracy. I think that Hollywood has not seen what s really coming at them. The real freight train is mass collaboration, mass creativity where people will be able to create Hollywood- quality films in small groups of people, working together. And then what? Just as 11 years after the founding of Wikipedia Britannica has just stopped printing there was a little bit of a blip of news headlines, but honestly it s nostalgia I loved Britannica, I still love Britannica it s a bit of nostalgia because if I think,
Oh my God, what a loss in my life, I don t have Britannica, I think actually I haven t touched my Britannica in about eight years, which is why they can t sell. They sold 3,000 copies apparently last year in print form. So, it will be a decade or so after the first Hollywood- style collaborative community project where we begin to see high- quality, really entertaining and artistic things coming from communities online. Hollywood will be mostly dead. And no one will care. We ll see a few nostalgic stories about, Oh, remember when. One final caveat: I have deliberately gone out on a limb here. I ve made a lot of predictions in my life. Many of them wrong. I m actually being optimistic when I say many of them. I would say most of my predictions have been wrong. And in fact many of the innovations on the Internet that you went through earlier [that Leonard Kleinrock outlined earlier in this opening plenary] you mentioned Napster, I remember the first time I read about Napster in a news story. I m a guy who lives on the Internet, basically 24 hours a day. I remember reading a story about Napster and they had 25 million users and I had never heard of it. So sometimes I completely miss what s going on. I have deliberately stated this in a provocative way to inspire and motivate you to really think about it. I am making a prediction, but in a deeper sense I m thinking, Gee, there s a lot that s going to happen that s very hard to see right now. It s very hard to know what could happen. If you really thought, back when I started Wikipedia, how can you best encourage the growth of a large- scale encyclopedia project online I can guarantee you what most of the conversation would have been about is very strong IP protection, digital rights management, all the kinds of things to prevent people from copying it everywhere. You would have been completely wrong about that. Wikipedia, of course, quite famously is freely licensed. You can copy it anywhere and do anything you want with it and its grown and grown and grown and grown. I think we have to be very very careful, in particular when we are listening to the complaints of Hollywood about piracy. I am more sympathetic than you might expect, but I think we also have to recognize that there s a very good chance that their entire production model is going to look really antiquated in just a few years, in the same way that we realize that the Britannica production model is really antiquated today. So further, I will say this, the best way to predict the future is to build it. So, let s build it.