Cloud culture clash

08.12.2010

Charles Leadbeater has advised governments on the rise of the knowledge driven economy, the internet and future strategies. He spoke to Ann O’Dea about how a cloud-based future might look.

Innovation authority Charles Leadbeater is a man with his finger on the pulse of the so-called New Economy, and earlier this year he produced a report for the British Council’s think tank Counterpoint entitled Cloud Culture. So when we interviewed him for Irish Director, we grabbed the opportunity to tap into his thinking on a cloud-based future too.

In Cloud Culture, Leadbeater says the web is changing culture more quickly and profoundly than it is changing politics and even business. “It is changing how we express ourselves, how we communicate, how we share and find what is important to us,” he says. “Culture and media in the decade just gone was dominated by the rise of Web 2.0 and social media. The decade to come will be made by the rise of cloud culture, a culture based on even more intensive collaboration and connection. That will fundamentally change how we relate to one another through culture.”

Battle for terrain

A long time advocate of the open web, and open innovation, in Cloud Culture Leadbeater describes how many traditional media companies have been trying to resist the emergence of open cloud culture over the past decade, and how a new generation of media companies, only created in the last decade are trying to profit from its explosive growth. “These are the cloud capitalists – Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Twitter – that seek to make money by creating and managing clouds for us,” he says.

Their emergence, he continues, has sparked a “vicious civil war” with the media old guard. “In the autumn of 2009 Rupert Murdoch, the archetypal global media baron, unveiled plans to charge readers for his newspapers’ content online. It was virtually an admission that traditional newspapers would not remain commercially viable for much longer. It was also a broadside against Google. Murdoch accused Google of giving people access to his newspapers’ content for free but refusing to share the advertising revenues that Google garners from its information search business.”

There are a whole range of battles for supremacy going on between old and old, old and new – and, above all. between the new players, he tells me.  “Basically the way of thinking about the media and information industries is like a huge civil war going on, where there’s a huge battle between established old players – newspapers and book publishers against one another because they’re fighting in a kind of declining share of the market.

There’s intense competition there. “Then there’s intense competition between new and old so there’s intense competition about the future of the newspaper – is it physical or electronic? Or the future of the book - is it Kindle or Sony or is it Apple?  And what’s the relationship between e-books and real books and publishers and writers – that’s all very intense.

“But then there’s also this big contest between the new – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Salesforce you know, all these new players, people who are providers of cloud services,” says Leadbeater. “Because we’re so fascinated by the contest between the old and the new, because that’s so disruptive, we kind of miss this struggle between all these new players to control the future terrain and that’s really where we’ll be headed in five or 10 years.”

“They’re the players that are organising where we will end up, they’re ahead of us, they’re sort of putting their fences out on the prairie to which we think we’re headed, and we’ll find ourselves in Googleland or Amazonland or Facebookland. “Now that might be perfectly sensible and good because they might provide us with great products and services for which we’re prepared to pay, but it may also create monopolies and control, which we find inhibiting,” he cautions. 

“Certainly were all that to somehow end the open web then that would be, I think, a really significant downside because it’s the openness of the web that’s allowed lots of innovation to come about and new people still to come in,” he says. 

Journey into the unknown

Not that anyone can predict exactly how this new landscape will look, says Leadbeater. “We need only look at the pace of change in the last 10 years to see the speed with which new players can enter and change everything. 

“Ten years ago probably not that many people were using Google, YouTube was virtually unheard of, Facebook hadn’t been invented, Twitter was nowhere near, Wikipedia was in its absolute infancy,” he says. “There were lots of things to do with the social web that we hadn’t seen, hadn’t anticipated which are now absolutely taken for granted.”

“Plus you know, the smartphone didn’t exist, Apple hadn’t created the iPod and so forth, so we’ve seen a huge change in 10 years, so I think we would expect huge change in the next 10 years.

“And whilst I would expect Google to be there and Apple to be there, there will be people doing things that we currently don’t really understand or know about. However one of the big shifts will be the rise of more cloud-based services where, instead of networking computers together, we will go through clouds of data, software and all the rest of it. That has huge advantages in terms of cost because it’ll be much cheaper, and more flexible because you’ll only use what you need to use.”

Like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Leadbeater is excited about the potential could offers for greater collaboration. “It should be easier to connect things together, and yes it will also raise important issues about security but I think those are quite resolvable. 

Countering control

The issue will be more one about control, believes Leadbeater. “We’re moving into an era where we’ll be somewhat ruled by algorithm really.  And the people running the algorithms will have huge power and so that’s a bit scary, because the algorithms will do things that we don’t really know about.  

“You know, my wife and I are both friends on Facebook, we live together, we’re still married and we still have sex, but Facebook recently suggested that I reconnect with her because we’d lost touch!” he laughs. “So in cloud land things like that are capable of happening, because they run some algorithm over some information and they come to a conclusion that’s completely at variance with what life is.”

In Cloud Culture, Leadbeater lays out the ways in which public policy must counter any threat of corporate control of the cloud:

“Traditional media companies are trying to stall and resist the emergence of cloud culture, new media companies are engaged in a battle with one another over who will control which bits of the cloud” he says. “What is likely to get lost in all this are the interests of citizens and consumers.” Overall, however, Leadbeater is upbeat about the sheer possibilities offered by a future in which creativity and innovation can be facilitated by the cloud, but openness and collaboration will be the key.  “In this world you will be defined not just by what you own but by what you are prepared to share and how much effort you put into making it easy for others to share with you,” Leadbeater concludes in Cloud Culture. “It is not just what you do but how you link with others that counts. Cultural relations in the era of the pervasive web and ubiquitous participation will mean thinking, working, creating with other people. Welcome to the world of with.”

This article is part of Cloud Computing, An Irish Director Report, a practical guide to the cloud for decisionmakers.