Joi Ito on the internet as a (innovation) philosophy

Excerpted from Joi Ito:

“As we all know, the Internet won. It was the triumph of distributed innovation over centralized innovation.

The belief system of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, the freedom to innovate and the freedom to hack without asking permission. No one can know the whole of it; it cannot be centrally controlled and the innovation happens in small groups on the “edges” of the network.

This belief system has created a massive network of distributed innovators. Internet innovators develop standards with each other and share the products of their work in the form of free and open source software. Lately they are even sharing electronics and physical designs.

The architecture of the Internet and the abundance of free software and components has driven the cost of manufacture, distribution and collaboration – the cost of innovation – down massively. Software companies used to cost millions of dollars in venture capital to start – today for little or no money, entrepreneurs are able develop and release a “minimum viable product” and test it with real users on the Internet before they have to raise money from investors.

In fact, it is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something. The map is now often more complex and often more expensive to create than trying to figure it out as you go. The compass has replaced the map and the idea of “rough consensus running code” has spread from the ideology behind network architecture to a fundamental philosophy for startup companies and the “lean startup” movement.

3D printers, laser cutters, online distribution, supply chain services and even sophisticated manufacturers have become cheaper, standardized and connected via the Internet. We are seeing the emergence of a community of hardware hackers and open hardware designs very reminiscent of the communities of developers who write the open standards and free and open source software of the Internet and I anticipate an explosion of grass-roots innovation around hardware as we saw in software. The Media Lab is very involved in all of the elements of this movement.

At the Media Lab, we have a multi-disciplinary group of faculty, students and member companies working together to invent the future by applying the philosophy of “rough consensus running code” to a wide variety of fields in addition to the future of hardware design.

At the Media Lab we focus on learning through creation instead of instruction. We are empowering individuals to experiment, create, and iterate. We produce demos and prototypes and share and collaborate with the rest of the world through the Internet and a distributed network of connections and relationships. We are not about centralized instruction but rather a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.

What has been a wildly successful model for consumer Internet startups in Silicon Valley turns out to be an extremely good model for learning and for a wide variety of fields and disciplines, and we are trying to empower more and more communities to also have access to technology and the ability to participate and create.

For example, in the High-Low Tech group we are designing new materials and technology to allow an extremely diverse non-technical group of online and real-world communities to learn how to build their own electronics and learn about technology.

In the Lifelong Kindergarten group, we are managing a massive community of young people around the Scratch programming language, which allows very young children to write their own software and share their projects online and build upon one another’s code and ideas.

Neoteny, one of my favorite words, means the retention of childlike attributions in adulthood. Childlike attributes include learning, idealism, experimentation, wonder, and creativity. In our rapidly changing world, not only do we need to continue to behave more like children – we can teach our children to retain those attributes that will allow them to be the world-changing, innovative adults who will help us reinvent the future.”