This is one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive. Samuel Clemens came back from the dead, and his name is now Doc Searls. This series of interviews features Doc Searls, who most certainly will be remembered as the creative journalistic wit of the Free Open Source Software movement. Like Samuel Clemmens before him, Doc Searls is a journalist with a piercing wit and insight into the fundamental nature of things. Doc even looks somewhat like Mark Twain, with his salt and pepper hair and his perpetual wry smile.

Doc might be most well-known for being one of the four co-authors of the "Clue Train Manifesto", a small and pithy book about how the Internet has changed forever the way that humans talk with each other. Long before Thomas Friedman wrote "The World is Flat", Doc and his gang were traveling everywhere talking about how the Internet and Free Open Source Software have leveled the playing field and created international relationships where before there was only uncertainty, fear and doubt. Doc is also a senior editor at the Linux Journal, which Doc jokes means that he is the oldest guy there.

In this series of interviews, Doc expounds on his understanding of the Internet as a place where "connoisseurship" happens, a commons in cyberspace. He views markets as conversations leading to relationships, not merely as dry shipping channels where, as he says, "vendors shove crap at consumers." In fact, he says that the notion that consumers are "fish that eat products and crap cash" is entirely mistaken in the world of the Internet.

Doc reminds us that Larry Lessig is right when he says that the Internet is a place, not a series of pipes, much as ATT would like to have us believe the contrary. No one owns the Internet, Doc says, and everyone can use it, and anyone can improve it. Free Open Source Software is one of the things that enabled the Internet, and it is one of the things that Doc says is attached to the Internet and will take on the fundamental qualities of the Internet: openness and transparency. Doc says that the Internet possesses fundamental insfrastructure much the same as the core of the earth, a foundation upon which other things are built. Doc cites Technorati as an example of the use of Free Open Source Software to listen updates to blogs through RSS.

When asked if Microsoft might succeed in locking down the Internet, Doc says that could no more happen than Microsoft locking down the core of the earth. He says that the Internet is a hollow space that connects people immediately from one to one across that hollow space, a bubble, and that it is impossible for any one person or company to occupy that space to the exclusion of any other. This is an important idea for the Digital Tipping Point, because we the DTP crew are gathering ideas as to whether it would be possible for Microsoft to kill Free Open Source Software by locking down the media formats (codecs) that transmit our increasingly digital culture, thereby excluding Free Open Source Software from meaningful use to access the Internet. Doc assures reminds us that the Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around censorship to heal itself.

Doc is many things, but most of all he is a teacher and a performer, and the DTP crew is very proud to share with the world this excellent performance by one of the brightest minds of our time. Plan on playing these interviews several times over, because it is difficult to catch everything Doc says the first time around.

This interview was shot in a storage closet in off of a huge conference hall at the San Diego county fairgrounds, and so you will hear voices and singing in the background as the music and conversations echo from the main event hall into the small storage closet. The cacophony is a fitting backdrop to the an interview of a man who has written and talked so much about the orderly chaos of bazaars and markets. The shot was framed the way it was with lots of white space over Doc's head because he was very animated and moved around a lot, and we wanted a steady camera that would both catch his expressions and make sure that his face would not move out of the frame.


If you like this segment, please consider typing up a summary for it and emailing that summary to Christian Einfeldt at einfeld@gmail.com. Your work will be credited and posted on this page.

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at digitaltippingpoint.com.

Or, if you would like to contribute by directly transcribing this particular video segment, you can do so by going here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Tape_038

and typing the audio as you hear it into the wiki. Please be sure to add the transcription for this segment under: Segment 008, Doc Searls
You can find other ways to contribute by going to our wiki front page here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

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