Rethinking the Digital Future
In 1991 a Yale professor David Gelernter envisioned a lot of what we now do on the Internet. Future computing, he thinks, may be organized around a concept called 'lifestreams.'
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
Is it David Gelernter's time to be rich?
Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is already destined to be remembered as the man nearly murdered by the Unabomber. After a painful recovery, he blossomed as a conservative social critic and continued to pursue his personal vocation of painting. He's also written books on subjects as diverse as the future of technology, the meaning of Judaism, and the 1939 World's Fair. Today, the still-revolutionary opportunities of computing are again taking a central place among his varied interests.
To him, Facebook and Twitter are partial fulfillment of something he's been writing about and thinking about since the early 1990s, an evolution of the Internet into a form far less chaotic and more useful than today's. His preferred term is "lifestream." Whatever you call it, the cybersphere as it now exists is due for an overhaul.
Prophecy comes naturally to Mr. Gelernter. He is credited in some circles for having coined the term "the cloud." But what preoccupies him is the inadequacy of our conventions and practices for organizing the wildly expanding array of digital objects that populate the cybersphere.
On the desktop, he says, "The file system was already broken in the early '90s, the hierarchical system. Namespaces were saturated. I was sick of making up names like nsfproposal319. The file system got too crowded and people started crowding their desktops with icons."
On top of this complexity soon arrived the complexity of the Web, the mass of digital objects we know today, connected by hyperlinks but organized in a way satisfying to no one, except possibly Google. "The current shape of the Web is the same shape as the Internet hardware," says Mr. Gelernter. "The Internet hardware is lots of computers wired together into a nothing-shaped cobweb. The Web itself is a lot of websites hyperlinked together into a nothing-shaped cobweb."
The failure of the Internet to organize itself into a more useful metaphor is precisely what needs fixing. "It is impossible to picture the Web. It's a big fuzzy nothing. I sort of tiptoe around tiny areas of it shining a flashlight."
We sit in his family's modest, woodsy home a few miles north of New Haven. Because the Unabomber experience has so colored the press's interest in him, Mr. Gelernter, in profiles, tends to come across as grim. He's anything but grim. He's a bit of a comedian, in a deadpan sort of way. He cites the "most talked about" part of one of his books, but quickly adds, "not that any part was greatly talked about."
In that book, 1991's "Mirror Worlds," Mr. Gelernter described a future in which all our activities would be mirrored on the Web. Almost as soon as it was published he began thinking about a radical new way to organize our digital mirror world. He started a company to pursue his vision, but it was not well conceived and went out of business after a few years. Today its patents, now owned by an investor group, are at the center of a major lawsuit with Apple.
The idea, though, of lifestreams has been catching on. A lifestream is a way of organizing digital objects—photos, emails, documents, Web links, music—in a time-ordered series. A timeline, in essence, that extends into the past but also the future (with appointments, to-do lists, etc.). Facebook, with its "wall" constantly updated with postings by you and your friends, is a lifestream. Twitter's feed is a lifestream. "Chatter," developed by Salesforce.com for internal use by client companies, is a lifestream.
Mr. Gelernter believes streams are a more intuitive, useful way to organize our digital lives, not least because, as the past and future run off either side of our screen, at the center is now—and now is what the Internet really is about.
Eventually business models based on streaming will dominate the Internet, he predicts. All the world's data will be presented as a "worldstream," some of it public, most of it proprietary, available only to authorized users. Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system. The stream will become a mirror of the unfolding story of their lives.
"I can visualize the worldstream," says Mr. Gelernter, explaining its advantages. "I know what it looks like. I know what my chunk of it looks like. When I focus on my stuff, I get a stream that is a subset of the worldstream. So when I focus the stream, by doing a search on Sam Schwartz"—a hypothetical student—"I do stream subtraction. Everything that isn't related to Schwartz that I'm allowed to see vanishes. And then the stream moves much more slowly. Because Sam Schwartz documents are being added at a much slower rate than all the documents in the world. So now I have a manageable trickle of stuff."
A stream is any stream you care to describe. "These very simple operations, which correspond to physical intuitions, are going to give people a much more transparent feeling about the Net. People will understand it better, and the Net itself will support what is clearly emerging as its most important function, which is to present relevant information in time."
His son Daniel, a recent Yale graduate, sits in on our interview. His apparent dual mission is to tout the inevitable triumph of a new company the two are working on while making sure Mr. Gelernter doesn't say anything to queer his former company's pending lawsuit against Apple.
Mr. Gelernter himself grew up in the suburbs of New York, visiting Brooklyn regularly where both sets of grandparents lived. He believes America, and especially its educational system, has gone downhill in some ways since then. He recalls a time, in the 1960s, when poets like Robert Frost and painters like Jackson Pollock were as closely followed by the "educated middle class" as TV celebrities are today.
Mr. Gelernter's father studied physics and became a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence at IBM, so growing up Mr. Gelernter was "familiar with software and found it a comfortable topic." His ambition, from a very early age, was to be an important painter, but at Yale he pursued computing "as a path to supporting a family, which is a very important obligation in Judaism. Computing in the 70s and early 80s," he adds, "was not a path to absurd wealth. It was a path to well-paying jobs, compared to people in the English department."
There followed happy days and nights in the computing lab, which might have come straight from the memoirs of Bill Gates or other computing superstars. His early work on parallel computing—in which many computers cooperate on tasks—made him a superstar too.
His targeting by Theodore Kaczynski, living in a shack in Montana and waging his deranged war against modernity, has been told often enough. Mr. Gelernter was lucky to survive a mail bomb that tore open his chest and abdomen, mangled his right hand and eye. His blood pressure is said to have been undetectable by the time he stumbled from his office to a Yale clinic nearby. Today the glove on his right hand, mentioned in every media account, I learn is not a concession to those around him, but a prosthesis. "It allows me to get some use out of the hand. It's all ripped up and stuff, patched together."
He takes medicine for pain and visits a pain specialist regularly, but he has come to see himself as lucky compared to other chronic pain sufferers—able to "operate in the world, and do the things you want to do. It could have been a lot worse," he says.
The question posed at the top was meant whimsically. Mr. Gelernter, by any measure, is living a rich life. He has been making paintings since childhood. Lately he has allowed his work to be sold and next year will bring what he calls "an important event for me," his first museum show at Yeshiva University Art Gallery. He sees his work building on the "discoveries" of the New York abstract expressionists as well as the flat panels of Medieval devotional art. Interestingly, he also sees a similar new-old artistic potential in the high-definition video display: "Since the richness of stained glass emerged in the late 12th century, for the first time there is a new luminous art medium—a medium for creating glowing art."
Mr. Gelernter sold his first company, Mirror Worlds Technologies, and its intellectual property to an investor group years ago. The buyer insisted on giving him a small stake in the outcome of its patent lawsuits, and last year a jury handed down an eye-popping $625 million verdict against Apple for infringing lifestream-related patents in its Macintosh and iPhone operating systems. In April, the judge in the case overruled the jury and tossed out the award. The matter is now under appeal.
Mr. Gelernter says the former company has no relation to a new venture he and Daniel are working on—though Daniel is quick to note that they will be obtaining a license for the Mirror Worlds technology, as Apple supposedly should have done.
The new venture, for which Mr. Gelernter is just beginning to seek funding, will focus on developing a lifestream product for the Apple iPad. "We like the pad," he says. "A particular goal is to create a lifestream which aggregates the most popular social network streams, and includes email and stuff like that. It will generate revenues the way Twitter and Facebook do—by getting huge numbers of users, beginning at the place we know, Yale University undergraduates, who love glitzy new software. They tell their parents, who are big shots because their kids are students at Yale." The new product will spread virally, forming a vast audience that can be sold to advertisers.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Facebook started at Harvard and branched out to other universities before conquering the world. Facebook, which has evolved into a stream by which users tell their own stories and read each other's stories, is "plugging a very important gap in the cybersphere, but I don't think it's plugging it in an elegant way," says Mr. Gelernter. "I don't think Facebook will be around forever."
About Google he also has mixed feelings. He values Google's efforts to make the world's undigitized documents, such as out-of-print books, available to the worldstream. But he also mistrusts Google. "Google impresses me as wanting power more than beauty. Although Steve Jobs was no friend of mine, I admired the fact he was in pursuit of beauty. I don't pick up any of that at Google. The important engineers are the ones who are dominated by aesthetics, not just engineering."
Perhaps surprisingly, then, he's a fan of Bill Gates and thinks Microsoft (in which Mr. Gates no longer plays a leading role) has the potential to be an important player in the worldstream future. "They need somebody with a vision of where the Net is going, where devices are going. They're one of the few organizations with the resources to make a big move into the future, to make things easier and more elegant and therefore useful. If they were to decide to do it, they can do it."
As for his own return to entrepreneurship, he admits, "It's boring to watch from the sidelines, boring and a little bit depressing." The second time around should also be a lot easier, he adds, because lifestreams no longer are a "radical, weird idea."
Mr. Jenkins writes the Journal's Business World column.
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El profeta desconocido del ciberespacio
En 1991, el profesor de Yale David Gelernter predijo mucho de lo que hoy hacemos en Internet; ¿qué pronostica ahora?
Por Holman Jenkins, Jr. | The Wall Street Journal Americas
Gelernter es académico y profesor de informática en la Universidad de Yale. Foto: Archivo
David Gelernter, profesor de la Universidad de Yale, ya está destinado a ser recordado como el hombre casi asesinado por el Unabomber. Tras una dolorosa recuperación, el académico floreció como un conservador crítico social y continuó su vocación personal por la pintura. También escribió libros sobre temas tan diversos como el futuro de la tecnología, el significado del judaísmo y la Feria Mundial de 1939. Hoy, las oportunidades aún revolucionarias de la informática vuelven a ocupar un lugar central entre sus variados intereses.
Para él, Facebook y Twitter son la realización parcial de algo sobre lo que él ha estado escribiendo y pensando desde principios de la década de los 90, una evolución de Internet en una forma mucho menos caótica y más útil que la de hoy. Su término preferido es "lifestream", que en español sería algo así como "corriente de vida". Gelernter y la ingeniera en sistemas y escritora Eric Freeman acuñaron el término para describir "un flujo cronológico de documentos que funciona como un diario de su vida electrónico; cada documento que crea y cada documento que otras personas le envían es almacenado en su 'lifestream'". Como se llame, el ciberespacio tal como existe hoy necesita una puesta a punto.
La profecía es algo natural para Gelernter. En algunos círculos se le atribuye haber acuñado también el término "la nube". Pero lo que a él le preocupa es la deficiencia de nuestras convenciones y prácticas para organizar la impetuosa y creciente matriz de objetos digitales que pueblan el ciberespacio.
Con respecto a la computadora personal, Gelernter dice, "el sistema de archivos ya estaba roto a principios de los 90. Los espacios para los nombres estaban saturados. Yo estaba harto de inventar nombres como nsfproposal319. El sistema de archivos se superpobló y la gente comenzó a llenar de íconos sus escritorios".
A esa complejidad pronto se sumó la complejidad de la web, la masa de objetos digitales que conocemos hoy, conectada por medio de hipervínculos pero organizada de una forma que no es satisfactoria para nadie, excepto quizás sólo para Google.
"La actual forma de la web tiene la misma forma que el hardware de Internet", dice Gelernter. "El hardware de Internet es un montón de computadoras conectadas entre sí en una telaraña con forma de nada. Internet en sí misma es un montón de sitios web hipervinculados en una telaraña en forma de nada", explica.
La incapacidad de Internet para organizarse en una metáfora más útil es precisamente lo que hay que solucionar.
"Es imposible imaginarse la web. Es una nada difusa enorme. Atravieso en puntillas sus rincones con una linterna en la mano", añade.
Nos sentamos en su modesta casa, a pocos kilómetros al norte de New Haven, en el estado de Connecticut. Debido a que la experiencia con el Unabomber ha dado color al interés de la prensa sobre él, Gelernter, en los perfiles que se escriben sobre él, tiende a aparecer como un ser adusto. Será cualquier cosa menos adusto. Es un poco cómico, en una especie de forma inexpresiva. Cita una de las partes "más comentadas" de uno de sus libros y agrega: "no es que alguna parte haya sido muy comentada".
En su libro Mirror Worlds, de 1991, describe un futuro en el que todas nuestras actividades serían reflejadas en la web. Casi tan pronto como se publicó, el autor comenzó a pensar en una forma radicalmente nueva de organizar nuestro espejo mundial digital. Fundó una empresa para implementar su visión, pero no estaba bien concebida y quebró pocos años después. Hoy en día, sus patentes, en propiedad de un grupo de inversionistas, están en el centro de una importante demanda con Apple.
Sin embargo, la idea de lifestream ha despegado. Es en esencia una cronología que se extiende hacia el pasado pero también hacia el futuro (con citas, listas de tareas, etc.). Facebook, con su "muro" actualizado todo el tiempo por uno mismo o los amigos, es un ejemplo de lifestream. Twitter también lo es.
El futuro del ahora
Gelernter cree que estas líneas de tiempo son una forma más intuitiva y útil de organizar nuestras vidas digitales, sobre todo porque, como el pasado y el futuro salen de nuestras pantallas, en el centro está el ahora, y el ahora es de lo que realmente se trata Internet.
Con el tiempo, predice, Internet estará dominada por los modelos de negocios basados en lo que se conoce como streaming (es decir, la distribución de multimedios a través de una red de computadoras, de manera que el usuario accede o consume el producto al mismo tiempo que se descarga). Toda la información del mundo será presentada en un streaming global público, aunque en su mayoría disponible sólo para los usuarios autorizados. Los navegadores de la web se convertirán en navegadores de streaming. Los usuarios, a su vez, se acostumbrarán a seguir y manipular sus objetos digitales adaptados al streaming y no como archivos en un sistema de carpetas. Así, el streaming se convertirá en un espejo de la historia de sus vidas en desarrollo.
Un stream es cualquier stream que se le ocurra a alguien. Ello le dará a la gente "una sensación mucho más transparente de la red. La gente la comprenderá mejor, y la propia red dará sustento a lo que claramente emergerá como su función más importante, que será presentar la información pertinente a tiempo", explica.
Su hijo Daniel, un recién egresado de la Universidad de Yale, se suma a nuestra entrevista. Su doble misión parece ser la promoción del triunfo de la nueva empresa en la que ambos trabajan al tiempo que se asegura de que su padre no diga nada extraño sobre la demanda pendiente de su antigua empresa contra Apple.
Bomba en el correo
El padre de Gelernter estudió física y se convirtió en un investigador pionero de la inteligencia artificial en IBM. Es por eso que desde muy pequeño estuvo familiarizado con el software. Su ambición desde muy temprana edad era ser un pintor importante, pero en Yale estudió informática "como una manera de sostener a su familia, una obligación primordial del judaísmo". Su trabajo en computación paralela, en la que muchas computadoras cooperan en tareas, lo convirtió en una superestrella.
Gelernter fue bastante afortunado cuando sobrevivió una bomba que recibió por correo y que le abrió el pecho y el abdomen, destrozando su mano y ojo derechos. El guante que hoy lleva en dicha mano cubre una prótesis. "Me permite darle algún uso a la mano. Está toda rasgada y parchada", cuenta. Toma medicina para el dolor y visita a un especialista regularmente, pero se siente afortunado, capaz de "operar en el mundo y hacer las cosas que uno quiere hacer. Pudo haber sido mucho peor", reconoce.
Gelernter vendió hace algunos años su primera empresa, Mirror Worlds Technologies, y su propiedad intelectual a un grupo de inversionistas. El comprador insistió en darle una pequeña parte del resultado de las demandas de sus patentes, y el año pasado un jurado emitió un veredicto de US$625 millones contra Apple por infringir patentes ligadas a lifestream en sus sistemas operativos para Macintosh y iPhone. En abril, el juez del caso invalidó al jurado y denegó la indemnización. El asunto está ahora bajo apelación.
La nueva empresa, para la cual Gelernter recién comienza a buscar financiamiento, se centrará en el desarrollo de un producto de lifestream para el iPad de Apple. "Nos gusta la plataforma", dice. "Un objetivo concreto es crear un lifestream que reúna los streams de las redes sociales más populares y que incluya e-mail y cosas por el estilo. Generaría ingresos de la manera en que lo hacen Twitter y Facebook, a partir de un enorme número de usuarios, comenzando por el grupo que conocemos, los estudiantes de la Universidad de Yale, que adoran este tipo de novedades. Ellos les contarán a sus padres, quienes tienen abultadas billeteras porque envían a sus hijos a Yale". El nuevo producto se difundirá de manera viral, con una vasta audiencia para los anunciantes.
Si la idea suena familiar, es porque debe serlo. Facebook comenzó en Harvard y se extendió a otras universidades antes de conquistar al mundo. Facebook, que ha evolucionado en un stream a través del cual los usuarios cuentan sus propias historias y leen las de otros, "está llenando un hueco importante en el ciberespacio, pero no creo que lo esté haciendo de forma elegante", dice Gelernter. "No creo que Facebook dure para siempre".
En cuanto a Google, valora sus esfuerzos para hacer los documentos no digitalizados del mundo, como los libros fuera de circulación, disponibles. Pero "me da la impresión de que Google quiere más poder que belleza", dice. "Los ingenieros importantes están dominados por la estética, no sólo por la ingeniería".
Quizá sorprenda entonces el que sea un admirador de Bill Gates y cree que Microsoft tiene el potencial de ser un actor importante en el futuro de los streams. "Es una de las pocas organizaciones con los recursos para hacer algo grande en el futuro, para hacer las cosas más fáciles y más elegantes y por ende más útiles. Si se decidiera a hacerlo lo lograría"..
Fuente: La Nación
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