Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Who Is Chris Messina?

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

As I said on Friday's show, I figured that since Chris Messina has been co-hosting with me for about a year, maybe it's time to republish the Internet History Podcast episode I did with him. After all, many of you might know him as the inventor of the hashtag, but did you know about all of the early Web 2.0 stuff he did? It might help you better understand the perspective Chris brings to our interview episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Well, as we say in this episode, he'll always be known as the inventor of the hashtag,

but Chris Messina has been central to so many things in tech over the last 20 years or so. He helped Mozilla launch Firefox. He founded Bar Camp, where so much Web 2.0 goodness happened and was launched. He co-founded the first co-working space in San Francisco. He helped Google try to grok social with Google Plus. Oh, and of course, that hashtag business. My thanks to Chris for sitting down to talk about all of that, and most intriguingly, what's up next for him?

Chris Messina, thanks for coming on the Internet History Podcast. I'm super excited to be here. I'm glad you made time while you were in town. I think you're two or three years younger than me, but for people that are mostly contemporaneous to me, my favorite opening question is your first computer that was either, you had access to or sometimes the more interesting one

is the first computer that was yours and nobody else's. Well, it depends on how you define a computer. I remember that my grandparents had an Atari and I would go play that. So that is a computer, but that's not what you would think of as one. The first one that was mostly mine by virtue of me mostly destroying it was an IBM PS2,

probably in the early 90s. It didn't happen to be a Model 25, did it? Because that was my first one. No, I don't think so. It probably would have been after that. But I think it ran probably Windows 3-1, and I remember getting into DOS a couple times and having no idea what commands did,

but I was reading magazines and the number of times where it was broken and my dad would angrily come up to my room and sort of yell at me. And Christopher! I broke the computer again. That's kind of how I cut my teeth, like getting excited about computers and what they could do.

It is funny though, even it's weird how that works, but like that three year difference, like I got started with the command line. And then I remember when we got Windows 3, right? And it's like, and then I would still, anytime I wanted to do stuff, I was like, get me back to DOS where I know what I can do with this thing, you know. Yeah, no, so I mean that probably is very formative for me

because like I grew up mostly being like an artist. Like just drawing comic books and things like that. And my grandmother was an artist. And so I kind of imagined that I would be going into art. And then when I discover the computer and like the logic of a computer and how it worked and like programming T-I-82 games and things like that, like I just, I don't know, like I fell in love with that ability to control and manipulate the system. And so, and yet I would be creating art.

I remember like Mario Paint was like a big influence on me. It was just a way of getting into a computer and expressing things that, you know, doing on paper just would take forever. Expressing things. What's more powerful? Expressing things or getting the machine to do what you have in your head? I don't know if there's that much of a difference. Right. I think, I mean, and you're hitting on what has been a theme, I think, of my career and experience with computers. On the one hand, I've been super excited with social technology. And then on the other hand, it's about that interaction between, the memes that are in our minds and the ability to communicate them with increasing fidelity to the computer. And so, yeah, the ability, obviously the awareness of what a computer can do in terms of its output potential,

but then also the awareness of your thoughts on how to communicate them into a digital form and how to reduce them in their complexity to something that the computer can then reproduce faithfully and yet with some kind of expressive aspects, I think, has been just a fascinating thing to witness. And on the one hand, it's structured, I think, thinking for the last 30 years so that much more of the left brain folks have kind of won the Internet in a way. And they've reduced human experience down to a set of interactive buttons, like the like button, for example, like is essentially this, you know, kind of explosive zip file of lots of different meanings and messages that was like the simplest possible thing that people could understand how to interact with. I'm going to know what their state of consciousness. And then now I think we're starting to just start to see the shift back towards the right side of the brain and towards more sort of like emotive experiences and communicative experiences and artistic experiences. And especially in the realm of like AI and conversational agents and our friends who we won't name unless we activate them.

Our computers are starting to need to actually behave more like us. and for a long time we were behaving more like the computer. And that, to me, I think, has been a very interesting theme to see. And so the fact that you started out on the command line, sort of typing direct commands into the machine meant that one, you had to know all the commands in your head, more or less on a look-up table of possibilities, whereas a graphic interface allows you to visually explore space and to see what might be possible

by tapping and clicking on things. Well, and it's also interesting, because note that I said that, if I really want to do something, get me back to the command line right now. How that shapes what you think is possible. I mean, it's like Google, right? I mean, this is where we're in this amazing transition to conversational interfaces.

And those of us who grew up with the search box are so used to just thrashing and typing things in to get to, like, the result. And Google works so hard to get the page of results down to the lowest amount of time possible such that you can barely start typing and the results already show up, to unlearning.

that behavior and being willing to sort of have this clumsy conversation with, you know, the Alexis and the Google assistance of the world. And so children are growing up in that world, which is very similar ironically to the command line that you started with. Yeah. And so they will learn the incantations to manipulate those devices, in which case the sort of voice command line will be much more natural and native to them and will become the ones who are very slow. I would never put this on the internet, but you should see the videos of my daughter talking to the Google Home. Yes.

Anybody who was the young kids? Having arguments with the Google Home? Yeah. Like that to me, like when I think about the future, that's what I'm looking at and that's what I'm seeing. And so, you know, I wrote about bots and conversational commerce and conversational interfaces in 2016. And that's roughly what I was kind of imagining.

You know, one was this return to like the direct manipulation of the command line. But two, that AI and machine learning and voice interfaces would allow many more people to have that ability to command a computer to do things that you want, as opposed to having to go through this jungle of app icons, which the more apps you install, the more you forget which icon represents which action or verb. And so you're stymied by this interface that just grows and grows and grows exponentially to the point where you just don't even bother.

And most apps never get launched. Yeah. You were up in New Hampshire? I grew up in New Hampshire. And you were coding websites in high school. I was. And you were even like, were you working for like some sort of web design company or was it your own company? No.

So I worked for the first web design company in New Hampshire. It was called Leading Edge Media. They had a four-letter domain, LAMI.com. I mean, talk about like sort of like on the one hand, super early nerds, right? People like building their own computers and stuff. But also people who are probably about to ride like a pretty awesome wave because that was, you know, know, in the mid-90s, I graduated high school in 99. And, you know, so these guys were building the first web servers.

They had the first internet things. Actually, it was funny. I remember one time I was, I think maybe we were using Rhapsody, which was the, or was it was a real player. Whatever it was. I was using streaming music. Yeah, it would have been a real player first. Yeah.

And, you know, the quality was like not so great and it sounded like kind of watery or whatever. And I remember the boss brought me into his office. at the beginning of one month, I don't remember which month it was, and essentially scolded me because I caused some sort of like $11,000 bill for like the internet access because I've been streaming music the entire time. So I learned very quickly about streaming and about Napster and about pirating content and that whole world.

I think I either heard or read you say at some point that you were almost, you almost weren't going to go to college because, because you felt like you were learning. This stuff is happening. I'm learning it in real time. What am I going to go to college for? Yeah, that was the funny thing. And that's been a little bit of the story of my life

in many of the academic settings I found myself in. In high school in particular, you know, like obviously school felt a bit like a prison. They're sort of like design-like prisons. And I don't know if I had ADHD or something, but certainly I was not very captivated or motivated by school. I had a lot of just like interests. And I was super excited.

Again, I was doing design on the computer, and I was building websites and programming things. I remember I discovered HTML because one of my colleagues, one of my fellow students. That's a colleague. Hello, fellow kids. Yes, around. Had actually turned in his science homework written in HTML and printed out back when Netscape 2 was around. And it just blew my mind that he was writing his code and then creating tables and then printing it. And so I kind of got into it that way.

And then I also was part of First, which is a robotics competition. Dean came in the guy that invented the Segway, lives in New Hampshire. I was going to say, he's from up there, yeah. Yeah, not actually maybe 10 minutes from where I grew up. And, you know, so I was part of, like, the first competition and, like, into the robot stuff. But I was also in the Art Honor Society. And, you know, another funny anecdote was, I back then, of course, this is, like, during the run-up to the dot-com bomb, was subscribing to all these internet magazines like the industry standard and red herring and um god it was like

upside yeah yeah and so what i would do is i would go into the magazine shops and i would um pull out the little insights to or uh insert cards to the subscriptions and uh when they'd ask you information about your business um you know how much money do you make how many employees you have like all that stuff i would always check the far right box which is like you know 50 million dollars a year like 2 000 employees like all this stuff and so they would just send me these complimentary subscriptions for like you know where we're like $5 in our magazines. And so I was like eating up all the stuff. I actually have a bunch of these still saved somewhere in my stuff.

And I was just so excited about the future and so excited about the internet and so excited about this whole world and what was happening. And so yeah, so not only did I work for, I was the other job, I don't remember, I worked for that web design company and I also worked for a company called Network Resources or something where we were doing like the,

like I remember someone was describing network architecture to me and showed me a picture of a cloud, and I had no idea, like, what this was or what this meant. And that was sort of my first exposure to, like, thinking about network architectures and distributed systems and, like, all the stuff. So anyways, yes, when I came to thinking about college, I was basically, like, all the stuff that I'm learning on my own, all the stuff that I'm learning in this web design company, this is the future.

And I don't see any reason why I would go to college when all I'm going to be doing is, like, reading books from stuff that happened, like, 150 years ago. And so, yeah, so it was a very close call. but I had an English teacher, Mr. Duffy, that was really adamant about me really giving a hard thought to this because if I didn't go to college, I wouldn't go to college, and that would actually change the rest of my life and cut off a lot of opportunities. And so I was thinking about doing design school, thinking about going to graphic design programs, but then realized that because of all my interests, like I needed to go to a university,

and I applied and got into Boston University and Carnegie Mellon, because Conradney-E-Mellon, because Because Connie Mellon was further away from home, that's where it went. And what's the, it's communication design or something? Correct. So CMU has two, sort of a split design program, like industrial design. So physical products, you know, car interfaces and stuff like that, and then communication design. And that's interfaces, graphic design, typography, photography, probably some advertising,

but we didn't really do too much of that. And so, yeah, I majored in communication design. What, well, actually, what year do you head out west? When did I go to San Francisco? Yeah. So I graduated in 2003, and I stayed around Pittsburgh for a year. I worked for the ACLU. I built their database and intake system for their Civil Liberties program, and that was eye-opening,

but Pittsburgh was just too small for me. So I left and arrived in San Francisco in 2004. And at the time, I'd been working with and volunteering for the Howard Dean Presidential campaign and also had been starting to get involved with the Mozilla project. And again, having been a web designer, I knew that Internet Explorer was like what that business was built on. But I also understood that Microsoft wanted to essentially shut down the web and move everything into ActiveX and proprietary control systems. And actually in 2002, I read this paper by this Lithuanian mathematician named Andres Calclus, that was describing what he called an economy for giving everything away. And essentially was describing the early formation of the open source ecosystem.

And this is probably like the Stallman era and sort of those folks. And I was just so captured by this idea, partially probably because coming from New Hampshire, it's a liberty. state and so we're always about getting like the government off your back and just going to the woods and doing your throw in and wild and adventures But yeah, so so I was like well the web is super important and so what Mozilla is doing seems really interesting And it's taking this you know sort of like old you know super bloated code based from from Netscape and turning into like a fast modern browser Can you do real quick? Yeah Before I want you to do two things the second one being you just kind of alighted over or I started to get involved in the Mozilla project.

But one of the things that's interesting is how does that happen for a kid from New Hampshire? But before you do that, and don't go into too much detail because obviously anyone can Wikipedia this. But just give us a quick background of the Mozilla project. Sure. And who was behind it where it came from and what the goals were? I'll do the best I can. Sure.

So I actually, I very clearly remember exactly how I got involved in the Mozilla project. And that was because, okay, oh, okay, it's like, all coming back to me. So I'd forgotten this detail. So in college, I had started my own web design company. So I'd left, you know, leading edge media and I started my own thing. And it was called Sansorm Publishing. I had like little stupid logo with like the section type thing, whatever it's called. I don't know, the glyph, I guess. Anyways, that's less interesting. But one of the things that I was doing with my clients was trying to figure out how to manage those projects. And the best, what was called an intranet back then, this is like not on-prem. This is a

cloud service, which is kind of like unheard of, was a product from a company called Silver Orange. And Silver Orange created a, what was their internet product called? Well, I don't recall specifically, but regardless, they had built this thing and it was great. And one of the, I believe, programmers or designers of that product was Stephen Garrity. And Stephen Garrity had a podcast called Acts of Volition Radio. And I believe it might have been episode 13. He was, his firm Silver Orange, was doing design work for Mozilla. And he mentioned at the very end of the podcast that this company that he was working

with was looking for volunteers to help out. And that was the call to action. And I'd been listening to the podcast for a while. And I was just like, oh, my God, yes. Like, I love the internet and I love design. And I think, you know, this is the future. fuck Microsoft like I want to go help him and I emailed him and they brought me in to start working with them we worked on swag and we worked on designs we worked on because where are they at this

point that it's all about raising money when you get there well you know the project was probably kind of in shambles a little bit if I recall correctly you know they were pushing to launch I think if I recall so so first of all the project was called Phoenix it wasn't yet called Firefox I believe there's a trademark dispute about Phoenix, which is why it wasn't ultimately called Phoenix. But, of course, the idea of Phoenix was that it was going to take the Netscape code base, which had been, I believe, donated by AOL to this new nonprofit. And this new nonprofit, I think, probably was related to Mark Andreessen. I'm not fully sure.

Well, because that was their Hail Mary before the AOL acquisition was the open source. It was the last thing they did before the AOL thing. So, I mean, it's also important to probably keep in mind that, you know, first of all, like, this is the, I believe around the antitrust period for Microsoft. So Microsoft was turning into the evil empire slash the Death Star slash whatever villain you prefer. And open source though, meanwhile, was being cast as kind of like this communist agenda. And so it was very interesting to kind of be in the middle of this kind of cultural moment.

And so anyways, they had this code base for this browser that was based on this rendering engine called Gecko. And the idea was to take the underpinning. of that browser to get rid of, so there was something called Netscape Communicator, which was a suite of software, which included an email client and included, I think, a news group reader and included like all these things that were wrapped around this, you know, web rendering engine. And they're like, okay, let's get rid of all that crap. Let's, I think, let's build an extension layer. And let's also add tabs.

And that was essentially the innovation that the Mizzol project was offering to the world. And I want you to underline that we're saying tabs. It's the tabs you're thinking of. And yes, there were no tabs before. Believe me, that was an innovation worth doing a new browser for it. Basically, the value of a single tab was to almost double the power of your computer. Now, also keep in mind that the more tabs you had open, the more likely it was that your computer would die. And modern tab memory management and all this stuff, and while Chrome eats up your CPU and whatever now,

I mean, back then, like, it was a nightmare. And so essentially, the web was a forwards and backwards kind of propositions. Yes, you could type something into like, you know, the toolbar or the search box, which used to be separate. But mostly, you know, you'd have one browser window open, and so you had a very linear line of progression in terms of the work that you were doing. Maybe you could open up a new window that was separate, but that was like a whole new instance of that app. It's like a different desktop. Exactly, that's right. So the amount of productivity that you gain and the speed efficiencies and the fact that Mozilla was supposedly less susceptible to viruses, because Microsoft

Windows was like this just festering, you know, sort of, you know, you just imagine an apple full of maggots. Like, that's kind of like what it was. And so Firefox comes along and it's the faster, safer, more secure browser. And yeah, exactly. So they'd been given this Hail Mary to go build this other project. And as far as I remember, Mozilla was like, you know, kind of screwing everything up. And there was like all this confusion about what to do and where to go.

And then this kid out of Florida shows up, 16-year-old, probably 15 at the time, named Blake Ross, and he comes along. And essentially somehow, I'm not sure what his social gifts were, but was able to cut through the noise and basically say, this is the product that we're building, and was like this wonder kid. And essentially, you know, I don't know how much of the code basically rewrote, but is owed a great deal of credit for essentially getting the product out the door. And so once Firefox started to get going and they started to do these regular releases, like I remember, I think Phoenix 0.2 or something and then 0.3 and 0.4 and so on, there was this real momentum that was building in this sort of like latent excitement. And I was working in the Silver Orange Intronet, which is called Intronet. That's what it was.

And we were starting to plan for like the community release, kind of like getting the community excited about. And remember too, like the Firefox project was also very associated with like Linux, because again, that's where the open source developers were working because there wasn't a lot of open source projects on Microsoft. And the Mac was semi irrelevant from a business computing perspective. And so, well, we, I forget who came up with the idea for spread Firefox, but that became essentially this community initiative to, you know, launch the browser using a very similar community donation-oriented program that inherited from what the Howard Dean presidential campaign had done.

So essentially, we were launching the browser as though it were president. And not only that, but we actually used the same software. So the way in which I got involved with, actually, that was the merger of my world. If I remember, yeah, that's what, oh, man, okay, that's what it was. So first, there was like the Silver Orange, you know, Stephen Garrity podcast. And then on the flip side, there was this guy, Zach Rosen, who I'd met in Pittsburgh and was working for the Howard Dean campaign. And so I wanted to volunteer and get to politics. And I was also excited about the web.

And it turned out that when I got to San Francisco, not only did I get involved in the Mizzle project, but then Zach contracted me to be a designer on this project called CivicSpace. And civic space was this distribution of Drupal, which was about organizing the presidential campaign. And so then we used the – because of Mitch Kippur. So Mitch Kippur was central to all of this because he was funding a lot. of it and he was hosting Zach Rosen in Mitch Kapoor did the spreadsheet what was this company called do you remember Lotus Lotus yes exactly well whatever it was was the it was no foundation right yeah whatever yeah whatever it was yeah that was in downtown San Francisco so this is all new to me I didn't know any of anything I'm just like

excited to be there and so we ended up using Civic Space as the platform to get Firefox launched. And, man, I remember two people, Dustin Orchard, who had 1976design.com, he's, I think, raising sheep now in New Zealand or something. He was one of these amazing web designers. Like the whole web design, Web 2.0 thing was, actually, Web 2.0 hadn't happened yet.

But they were starting to do really, really cool things with just like, you know, browsers and designs and HTML for CSS was new. and why am I blanking on his last name Daniel Berka was one of the other Silver Warren's designers

The crazy thing you asked like how does a kid from New Hampshire sort of get into this stuff these guys were designers from Prince out of Rhode Island in Canada which is like super small

and so anyways Daniel Berka was one of those designers from that team and of course he went on to Google Ventures and he worked at Dig and Pounce and he's an amazing designer

and anyway So there was all this energy in organizing work to launch the browser. And initially what we wanted to do was buy an ad. The Muzola Foundation wanted to buy an ad to announce this browser for the world. And they felt that it was a browser that was really for the business world, given that Microsoft was like the P-Mith in that space. And they wanted to do an ad that was going to be put in the Wall Street Journal.

And I don't remember what exactly it was. But, oh, I remember. So we were going to do a 10-day campaign to raise some money to buy an ad for the Wall Street Journal. And it was like, I don't know, it was like, it was $25,000 or something. And Red Hat was putting in money. And I don't know if like Linux Foundation existed then, but maybe they were putting in money. IBM was putting in money. All these, all the Microsoft haters were basically like, okay, we're pitching all of this money into this open source project.

And we're like, cool. We're going to do sort of like a fundraising initiative just like we did for the presidential campaign. because it used to be, well, it still is, a lot of micro donations. But this is when it started, like 2004. Oh, 100%. Right. The Dean campaign, like the modern, like, Obama's campaigns took everything from the Dean campaign.

Yes, worth noting. Go on, sorry. And so we put up this, we designed a couple of, I mean, it's so funny. I mean, original growth hacking, I suppose. We designed a bunch of these, what they called, like thermometers, you know, to sort of like show how much money we were raising. Yeah, yeah. And then we also had these little buttons for like take back the web or whatever and to like donate and stuff like that.

And anyways, we put out a goal of raising another like 25K, but we had enough money essentially from the big companies to buy this ad in the Wall Street Journal. We started the campaign and within 10 days, I believe we'd raised $250,000. So we like 10xed what we needed to raise and suddenly we had way too much money. So we switched from putting this ad in the Wall Street Journal to the New York. times, which then broadened the audience for this considerably. And by virtue of being one of the few designers there, I ended up becoming the person who was responsible for designing this ad because they didn't have any other designs around. So I said about thinking about what I wanted this ad to be and what it should look like.

And so when it was like, okay, there's this great logo by John Hicks, you know, that we want to put in to sort of announce and show people what this thing looks like. It was like super slick and shiny and had gradients, which, you know, weren't in vogue yet. And then I had the idea, well, it would be amazing if what we did was we sort of had that logo, but we used every donor's name to make the logo on the second page. So not only it's like here's this product, but then here's all the names and here's the 10,000 voices basically that are telling the world that this thing exists and that open source is real and that, you know, you guys better wake the fuck up. And so what's amazing about that process was we had some high-end Power Mac G4, I think, and when I made the vectors to make the logo design, it would crash the computer, like 100% of the time. Like, it was just such a complex blend because, I mean, you just didn't have the techniques that you had now to do gradients over vector shapes.

And so literally they ended up getting in touch with someone from Adobe, which to me, me blew my mind that like, you know, here I've been using Photoshop for a long time. Like, you know, Adobe was like this, like, vaunted company often like the clouds someplace. But they just, like, called the engineer who, like, wrote Illustrator and had that guy, like, do the technique or whatever it was to make it happen. And we were able to get that done and we put it out there. And that's kind of how Firefox was delivered to the world. And are you there when, like, it starts to get traction, like, a million downloads, 10 million?

So that's, so that was all the lead-up. to like the launch. Right, right. And then that's, you're announcing to the world. Yes. And then. And then spread Firefox basically kind of like takes over as being the community initiative to essentially build an army of people going out and putting on all the websites that we could get our hands on, these little chicklets that's a take back the web. And then not only that, but Blake Ross was really critical on this. And this actually, I think in some ways probably informed the playbook that like Zuckerberg would then use for

Facebook because, you know, Blake Ross being, you know, this young guy. I knew that the real ground game would be played in colleges. And so essentially to train all these college kids before they got into the business world to know about, learn about, and standardize on Firefox as opposed to learning Microsoft products. And obviously, like the antitrust thing, was also painting Microsoft in a bad light.

But so on the one hand, there was the college program, and that was a decentralized campaign. And then there was the spread Firefox campaign, which had these weekly kind of goals to drive downloads. And it turned out, I don't know how many people know this, but that it was primarily porn sites that were spreading Firefox. Because obviously on the porn sites, there was a lot of spyware and viruses and all those other stuff. And this is even before like Bitcoin mining, so I don't even know what they were installing or, you know, stealing all your data or whatever it was.

But so that was one of the ways in which Firefox, you know, got a lot of distribution. And the interesting thing was that we had this leaderboard that I designed that was on the homepage that was like a little. little droplet that would refresh. And, you know, we'd always have, like, the top sites that had driven the most downloads. And for the first couple weeks, it was definitely, like I said, porn sites. And so we had to figure out one of, like, you know, filtering those out. And then two, what we found was that I think we were doing cumulative downloads. And so, of course, whoever was at the top was always the top. And so we had to switch over to a differential, like a percentage-based contest. And obviously that sort of democratized that a lot more.

But it was amazing, on the one hand, one, the amount of cheating that went on just to get the of being on like the front page of the spread Firefox site. And two, the sheer amount of downloads. And every week, or like whatever it was, whatever the period was, I think it was a week, I would do these like super, I mean, I wasn't very good at Photoshop, but I would make these amazing kind of like flaming balls of like fire and with the Firefox logo essentially to announce the various, you know, million point download thresholds that we reached until I think we hit 100 million downloads or whatever it was.

And then it just kind of like didn't make sense to like, well, unreasonably. kept counting but at that point we had pretty good distribution. I'm going to skip ahead to something because, so you're saying that this is slightly before Web 2.0, but it's also, it is things like Firefox that spark off the web 2.0. But also open source, this grassroots thing, that was all that was in the mix. It wasn't just about taxonomies and things like that. It was also about this sort of thing that you're describing. So this is what I want to jump to.

Please. Barcamp. Yes. Because it was all festival stuff. That's true. Where it was people looking, like, you're saying it's the nuclear winter after the dot. It's, it's the ferret's putting their head above the ground and being like, oh, you can breathe air again. And who else is here?

Yeah, so tell me the story of Barker. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, you're hitting this like so well. You know, after like, what was it, like 2002, 2003, you know, people were sort of just, they'd soured on the web and they sat out on the internet. You know, it was, you know, going to be like, you know, corporate suits and, you know, whatever, until the cows came home, so to speak. And yet there was this growing set of, I think young people who were excited about the internet, excited about the democratization of publishing

and about, again, like this spirit that Mozilla brought of taking back the web and of making this something that we could actually contribute to again, that wasn't proprietary, and that allowed anybody to contribute. Certainly that was the story that I believed and that resonated for me. And so actually around that time too, so again, I got there in 2004.

There was a series of hacker events that I would go to that were organized by David Weekly. And David Weekly later built a company in a product called PVWiki, which is one of the early productized wiki products. And these events were called Super Heavy Dev House. And that's because the previous – I forget if I'm supposed to say this or not, but there was a previous set of parties called Super Happy Funhouse that were happening in the dot-com era. Where apparently there was a lot of, let's say, just illicit activities that were going on, such that the very last one was just. shut down with an FBI raid with helicopters and sort of G men jumping into the roof and everything like that. So he was forbidden from having any more parties like that. And so instead he's like, well, why don't we have parties for like developers? And so as there was this sort of like slow rise

backup of kind of like geeks and nerds and those folks that were excited about the technology and excited about the future and you know, there's a little bit of a lineage to like the computer history club because some of those folks would come to these events. Super Happy Dev House was the place where I kind of learned more about the community and more about demos and more about hackathons and stuff like that. And then also, I should point out that I remember very clearly going to my friend Tontek-Cellek's house party.

And that's where I met a lot of the web community people, people who I'd been idolizing from afar because I was like not on the West Coast. That's where I met Matt Mullenweg. And I met, let's see, I don't know, there was just like this locus of interesting, smart, talent, and people that were coming together who were kind of all cut from the same cloth in a way. And yeah, so, you know, after going to a bunch of these super-happy dev houses,

Tim O'Reilly was organizing these events called Food Camps. And they'd been going on for several years, and this is a way for the O'Reilly Publishing Empire, which was quite small at the time, to get together either existing writers or potential writers, people that they wanted to write books, for example, on Pearl or whatever. And it was pretty exclusive. It was held in Sebastopol. And I believe it was Dave Weiner and Robert Scoble had not received their invitations to Foucahant 2005. And they were not happy about this.

And Dave Weiner is, of course, of XML and RSS fame. Robert Scoboble was a prominent, I believe, might have been the Microsoft sort of blogger influencer. Yeah, around that time, yeah. And so you had these two men who were blogging about their discontent about not being invited. And, you know, I was very new to the scene. You know, I had, you know, a small set of friends, but I didn't know anybody very well. Well, because wasn't it one of the things was, is they wanted to freshen up that they didn't want the same people every time. Yeah.

So, so there was sort of this aspect of, on the one hand, they wanted to keep the content fresh, like, you know, and the face is fresh. And also, this was something that wasn't just a place to go hobnob with other people. Like, this was, you know, this served a business function. And obviously they need to have more books that are written. And so they need to invite new people. And they wanted to keep it small enough that everybody could kind of meet each other. So there was a social design component to this. It wasn't just like, oh, we don't like you.

Don't show up. But it's like, you know, just because you were invited one year doesn't mean you automatically get invited back. Yeah. And that was something that, you know, those two in particular were very vociferous about. So Dave's on his blog complaining that he's not. And he was like, you know, Tim O'Raleigh, whatever, you know, shakes my fist in the general direction. And I was like, I mean, whatever, like, Tim O'Reilly is like a big open source guy. I read his little sort of manuscript pamphlet about open source, like, you know, he was big on Pearl.

I don't recall if he was involved in roughly the Mazzola thing or whatever. But like, he just struck me as someone who is, you know, free web, open web, blah, blah. And so I was like, well, I don't know why these guys are complaining. Like, why don't we just do the open source thing and take this event? and then fork it. And, you know, they can have their Foo Camp up in Sebastopol, and I'm going to organize my own bar camp, and that's going to be the derivative of that event.

You know, they document, actually Tontik was also very instrumental, I think, in encouraging us to work on that. They had put the organizing principles of Foo Camp on their own Wiki, and so all I did was, like, kind of take all their documentation, fork it, create my own project. And we should say, if you're not getting it, Foo Camp and Bar Camp, Foo Bar, go on. Yes, exactly.

And Foo was for Friends of O'Reilly. So yeah, that's it, I mean, it's a programming joke, but yes. You have to, you know, be a nerd to kind of get it. So you just reach out and say, hey, anyone that didn't go to food camp? It was a little more like, well, so here's the funny thing. So I'm a lifelong procrastinator. You know, hi, my name is Chris. I'd like to say I'm recovering, but I've been putting it off.

and so I've been looking for like a place to have like bar camp like on a campground like literally I was like let's do this like outside of the city or you know like let's go into the Ceras or something and nothing was happening and six days before Foo camp I was like I don't know if it's going to happen it's not going to come together I was using this app called playses and places was this mac menu bar app that was it was like pre it was pre dodgeball and it will allow you to kind of like check into a place or say where you were. It's sort of like find my friends, essentially. And I happened to be, oh, so another thing that we didn't discuss was after, so I tried to get a job at Mozilla, but they didn't want to hire me because they didn't have any obvious skills.

And so instead I ended up joining this other company that spun out of Mozilla that was led by Bart de Crem and that Blake Ross is part of actually, as well as, oh man, I forget some of their names. It doesn't matter. Well, I mean, it matters, but regardless, they started, we started this other company that was initially called Round 2. And the idea was to kind of like do a do-over and negotiate better advertising deals with the big search engines. And not only that, but to build an extension store, like an app store for Firefox. Because all of a sudden we had 100 million downloads. It's like, well, this is a market. Like, well, we could sell this audience.

And so the idea at that point was to like sell a bunch of antivirus extensions and like all this other crap. And I was like, you know, I don't know if we can build another browser successfully that competes with Firefox and just sort of bundles a bunch of stuff. Like, that's exactly where we came from. Like, why would you do that again? So I was looking at what a lot of my friends were doing. And at the time, we were using a bunch of kind of early web 2.0 services like upcoming.org and Flickr and so on to essentially share our lives to publish, you know, photos and to share events that we were going to. And I was like, you know, one of the problems with these services is that you have to sign up for them. And every new service that you sign up for, you have to create a new username and password.

This is before there was like any of these identity technologies. And so I was like, the obvious place, it seems to me, where, you know, the user's identity can exist is actually in the browser itself. And so if we add the concept of people to the browser, you can sign into the browser as yourself. you can manage your contacts, and then you can just sort of connect your local identity to a bunch of these service providers, and they'll just route the information appropriately. And that product was called Flock.

And so we sort of pivoted round two to become Flock, and I was the lead U.X architect or head of product, whatever it was. I made up some title for myself because I was woefully under... I wasn't qualified, basically. I just got to, yeah. I didn't want to finish that sentence in case that's where you're not going to go.

I mean, sorry my life is typically I'm just underqualified for most of the things I end up doing. And anyways, so that was kind of like happening. And there was this, I guess I bring that up to suggest that there was this burgeoning sense of this social web. And that was sort of like an important sort of adjunct, given that lots of my friends and lots of the people who are ultimately part of the bar camp community were using their personal blog to represent themselves online. And that included folks like Dave Weiner and Robert Scoble and all my friends. We all have their blogs and we were publishing all this stuff and aggregating all these things together. And so Playses was the way in which I discovered that Ross Mayfield from Social Text had just

secured the rights to this place in Palo Alto that was down the street from the flock offices and that they hadn't moved in yet. And so he was willing to offer up that venue for Bar Camp. and so that happened six days before a food camp was going to happen and I remember that when I said that I was organizing bar camp on August 23rd 2005 the number of people who emailed me angrily to tell me that they were going to food camp and that they wanted to be able to go to both and then if I just postponed bar camp that would be way better for them could I please do that and of course my libertarian sort of you know pit bull kind of feistyness was like

like, no, fuck you, you have to make a choice. You're either with us or you're with them. And we started, like, blogging about the process. We were very open and public about it. And, of course, that generated kind of like attention. And although my thought was that, you know, we'd have like, you know, 20 or 30 of, you know, these new friends that I just made in San Francisco come to this event in Palo Alto, which was like a big deal.

Instead, for that event, we had like 300 people show up. And people literally camped out. Like, they brought tents. They slept under desks. It was like this all night sort of. of hacker, semi-not-re-rave-rave situation that was all organized using early Web 2.0 tools and had a bunch of just really interesting, important people, or at least people that would become important.

We had product demos, and so, for example, TechCrunch launched at Barcamp and Pandora launched at Barcamp. Flock kind of launched at Barcamp. there were just like amazing conversations and discussions and wired ended up writing a story about it and it was like just this lightning rod in a sense for this I guess you know online community to come together and to see each other for the first time face to face and so after that you know we documented what we did and I don't know I mean there's so much more to the story but in the interest of time,

I'm going to move us along. But what you're describing is a movement coalescing where, again, that's not, maybe it is, you could argue, the start of Web 2.0 happening, but there were things already had already been going on and things like that and the whole wikis and all that stuff. But again, that's an interesting thing. That's the first time that all those people meet.

Yes. And see each other. In its way, where what used to be this sort of discrete, set of people that were kind of on their computers and messaging each other or reading each other's blogs, you know, kind of came together in Silicon Valley to say, oh my God, you're into this too. Oh my God, you believe in the social web too. Oh my God, like you're sharing your life online too. Let's do this really, really quick. But I'm imagining it's a similar impulse to starting the first co-working space. Yeah. So, I mean, very simply, the way that I would, that I sort of think about it is

that, you know, Bar Camp was in 2005 and co-working happened a year later because we had all these people who were coming together and meeting on a regular basis in coffee shops. And you couldn't leave your laptop out when you had to take a leak. And coffee shops were starting to fight back by closing up the power port so you can sit there all day. And also there was a trend to move workers home, right, to basically like do remote working. And this is before, like, you know, it was all that reliable. And so people were getting very lonely. So it just seemed like, well, you know, we've got this great community in the bar camp community of people who are

nerds and geeks on the internet, but they're also social, they like to be around each other, what if we create a permanent space for them to come together? And he's the same playbook from Barcamp more or less. And my friend Brad Newberg had essentially been kind of doing this behavior of getting people together on a bi-weekly basis. And he came up with the term co-working. And I remember very clearly walking down the street from ritual roasters in San Francisco and being like Brad, like we're going to make co-working like a big thing. And Like I can just feel it. Like I just know it's going to happen.

And, you know, we got that group together. And shortly thereafter, we started the first co-working space, the first sort of dedicated co-working space called The Hat Factory, and that was in Dog Patch. But back then there was no public transit, and it was like way the fuck out there and it was super cold. And we didn't know how to charge for it. And we ran that thing like horrible communists,

which are not great capitalists for like three months and weren't making any money and decided to shut it down. And then a little bit after that, Tara Hunt and I opened up citizen space and I think did it properly. We worked with the landlord to create this really great environment that people want to come and work from and we kind of made the space about

doing what we called accelerating serendipity. And part of that was on the one hand to have these desks that you could rent out but then also an open shared space in the back of the room where anybody would come and drop in. And so it sort of solved that problem that coffee shops didn't solve in providing kind of like a reliable place

where you can come and just kind of like hang out for a little bit, do a little bit of work, get some Wi-Fi, and, you know, meet people that had, you know, complementary skills. You know, we work didn't exist. And so we were one of the first kind of, like, you know, dedicated community spaces that was, like, really bringing the Internet as a way of connecting people together. And it's funny, actually, SoundCloud came out of Citizen Space. So my question is going to be, what did you learn at your time from Google? or at Google.

And I'm going to help you out. You work, you go to, you get recruited by Google because they want to get into social. And you were talking earlier about this whole idea of identity tying to the browser and things like that. And so like that's what you're really interested in at the time. You end up working on the Google Plus thing, which you can talk about, what you think of Google Plus now. But in a broader, this is my life, this is my career sense. I'm curious what your time, how do you think of your time at Google now? What year would this be?

So I joined Google in 2010. Okay. Like days before Google Buzz launched. And I was becoming very aware of the power that Facebook was accruing. And because I had been building the social browser. Because you're interested in identity. And open source. And open source and freedom.

Yes. And making sure of the wrong materials. Basically, is it possible to upgrade the web to include the concepts of people and activities and the primitives of social networking, right? Because the web itself had been built around documents and around sharing information for the military or for academia. And now the web was starting to be used for self-expression, blogs and so on, photos. Is it possible then sync that layer of programming, of application programming,

into the substrate of the web itself, such as the browser? It takes care of things like, you know, user profile data, allowing you to connect contacts, and so on, right? And the browser seemed like a logical place to do that because rather than the operating system, you know, you might have, like, multiple computers maybe or, you know, very early days of, like, mobile apps and stuff like that. But so anyways, yeah, having realized that the web lacked those protocols, I started to get together a bunch of my friends in the open web community. community to work on something that I called the Dezo Project, which stood for a distributed social. And the idea was to come up with a bunch of standard and open formats and protocols that would represent your profile data, your contacts, activities. So essentially like the news feed was a set of activities, you know, which are usually in the

format of active verb object. So Chris posted a photo. And that would be an extension to like RSS or Adam. So in the RSS world, you're essentially publishing a document that has a title and like a body. We were saying, well, what if you embellish that to add a verb? So it's not always the case that you're always publishing something, but you could be doing something else to it. And then a number of other formats that allowed for different types of interactivity between different websites. And our thought was that if we built these as extensions or plugins for WordPress,

that we could essentially enable this whole host of independent individuals who are self-hosting their identities in the web, to be able to log into each other's websites, and then connect as friends, and then create a new type of privacy regime where you could essentially choose to send your activity feed directly to your friends as though it were a feed of activities. And not only that, but that the browser flock could be one of many possible user agents

that could make use of this data and facilitate these types of interactions. And so the fact that we'd done a pretty good job of marshaling these formats forward, And I will say, like, I'm not an engineer. I just worked with engineers, and I tried to just continue to convene us and bring us together. Like, there was a lot of people that were involved in this effort. The fact that I was able to do that, I guess, put me in the position of looking like a kind of developer advocate.

And given that Google realized that they didn't really want to build a social network. They just want to index all the world's social data. And so the way to get that social data was through these types of feeds that we were starting to, you know, get produced out of WordPress blogs. they're like, why don't you come here and do that? Oh, and by the way, we hired the top contributors to that project that you were working with, including Joseph Smar and Bill Norris. And so, yeah, they brought me in, and I was, once again, completely not qualified to be a developer advocate because I really didn't even code.

But I could kind of speak the language of developers and designers and product people. And so immediately kind of got involved in that. And I don't think I really wanted to be a developer advocate, but I realized that Google needed a developer, you know, sort of flagged a plant in the ground because at the time they put all their developer documentation on Google Code. And Google Code was insufficient, I thought, as a brand to attract all these developers that were starting to patronize new social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And they actually hired designers to work in their developer docs. So I was like, we need a new platform for that. And so that's, I spent six months building and creating the project that was launched as Google developers. And so then, because I'd done all the design of that project, I then interviewed within Google to then become a U.S. designer on Google Plus where I worked on sign-in and the Google profile.

So what am I taking takeaways from that time period? Yeah. Well. That's the first time that you work with a big company. Yeah. And so my venturing into Google was like selling out. And the way in which I was effective in organizing all these different people to develop these formats and protocols for the social web was by being independent. So I could go into any company and talk to anybody anywhere and essentially convince them to join this project and to work on this thing that I thought was so important to the Internet.

And that if I went to Google, that was essentially pledging allegiance to one of the major players and would then mean that I would no longer be able to participate in those conversations. And yet I also knew that having a single identity provider for the internet, i.e. Facebook, would be bad for freedom and would be bad for the internet. And I was, finally, I think, had a job offer from Mozilla and was choosing between going to either Mozilla or Google. And when I stood back, I was like, well, you know, the reality is that if I want to fight this battle, I have to fight on a, fucking aircraft carrier and that's not Mozilla. And so I have to go on to Google and use that platform to promote these ideas. And I think it was the right call, but Google didn't have it in its DNA to build a product, specifically like a mobile first social product that anybody would ever want to use. Because frankly, the people that work at Google, they just don't have the

same instincts that most people have. Whereas Zuckerberg is much better at observing, serving human behavior and then building products to surf that behavior, whereas Google is much more high-minded and academic in how they want people to behave, at least in terms of, I think, social products. And so that dichotomy, I think, ultimately costs Google to battle. Although now, of course, they just use kind of statistical models to understand what people are going to do, and so they don't even need you to, like, add your friends and say what you're doing. Now they get the data through all these other sources. So it's almost way worse. All right. One of the reasons why I haven't reached out to you for years and years and years, and I feel like everyone must say this to you at some point. Like, do you, are you tired of telling the story of the hashtag?

No. One, I mean, I appreciate one, the ability to provide all that context, all that backdrop. Let me stop you for a second. Please. How do you feel about the fact that your obituary when it will be written? Hashtack rip. Bottom line. The inventor of the hashtag.

died today but right right you're cool with that I am because of what it represents of all the I mean I think except for Oath I would say which was a success from that the open social yeah yeah social but like from the social web era the hashtag is the one thing that I can point to that worked that did the thing that I wanted it to do which was to create more competition between players in the marketplace and to basically create a bigger pie than any one platform could offer so the hashtag derived from this observation that if you wanted to create interoperability between all these different parties and players, you had to have agreement.

And in some ways, it's like a horrible statement on humankind that the only thing that I could get people to garee on was a single character in front of a phrase, right, of all the protocols that we worked on. but it also demonstrates in so many ways like the sort of like humbleness of ideas and how if you plant them in the right moment with the right sort of nutrients and the right sunlight these things and sort of you know as saplings break through the concrete and eventually survive and like I was saying before my ability to be independent as an independent person I was able to go to all the app makers that were building apps on Twitter's API right and convince them that this was a good idea because Twitter thought it was stupid idea. I was going to say, tell that story real quick. So it's 2007, like August of 2007 or something that you propose it. And I think you literally go to Twitter and you're like, hey, guys, you should support this. Yes. And they say, yes. So also I want to revise myself. I think the first bar camp was August 7th, 2005. Whereas the hashtag was August 23. Okay. Okay. So the, the, What had been happening was in March of that year, right? So this is 2007.

I believe Twitter came out either the previous year or March that year at South by Southwest. So there's a bunch of people there who are using Twitter for the first time and are broadcasting their status updates or maybe it was the year before, whatever, it doesn't matter. And crucial to this is that it's not the smartphone area yet. And Twitter, people always forget this, was designed to be used SMS. Correct. Right, yes. So this is like so critical, right?

Yeah. Because there was such a, in a way, set of pressures that could, you know, form this diamond in the way that it was that it would like last and work. And so you're right. You know, if Twitter came out in March of 2007, let's say seven, or six, yeah, whatever. You know what? Yeah, it really matter. That's hazy.

Twitter first. Yeah. iPhone comes out June of 2007, right? And so I think, you know, there was like this sort of primordial time. where we were trying to figure out what Twitter was for, but suddenly we were able to use our non-smartphones, or feature phones, to publish the social web for the first time.

And so every time you send a tweet out, anybody that's following you gets a push notification, which was not a push notification, it was an SMS. Push notifications didn't come out until 2009. So there's a two-year lag. And so the only way to get messages pushed to a person was through SMS, which was just starting to be used in the United States.

whereas it was big in Europe and elsewhere, and that was mostly because of cost. So nobody has an iPhone, no one has a smartphone yet. We're trying to figure out how to make this new publishing platform more relevant to our interests. And there were a couple existing behaviors that were totally essential, that were already in the social web that were necessary to bring together. And I think about this sort of like a mixology. It was like the ingredients were there, just no one had made the Manhattan yet. And so a couple of those things, including.

included like IRC. So BarCAMP was organized primarily on IRC. So we had internet chat, real-time chat, basically what Slack is today, but over IRC protocol. Then we had Flickr, which had tags, the FOXOTOMI, also delicious. The Social Book and Marketing Service also had tags. And interesting enough, I will give Josh Schachter some credit, although I didn't know this until he pointed out much later, that he actually used the Poundson one in front of his tags in the email newsletters from Delicious. But I never saw those. So that was a side note. There was also a service called Jiku, which was built by Yuri Yangstrom. And what he had was the idea of sort of these channel tags. But you had to prefix your message with the tag.

And so that meant that, you know, that was a way of almost, you know, sending a direct message to a channel. But you couldn't sort of have the channel in the content itself. And that was important because over SMS, you had 160 characters. You had 140 for the tweet and you had 20 characters reserved for the username. And so you had such a small space that you had to fit whatever, you know, was the topic in the content itself. And then you also had, again, the feature phone, which had a numeric keypad, and on that numeric keypad was the asterix and the pound symbol. And so essentially I had massive distribution for two possible characters to use for this. And because IRC already used the pound symbol for channels, I was like, well, let's just put

these things together. Let's take this existing install base. And now anybody who has a feature phone or can type text on their phone is able to then add one of these tags to their content. But of course in the beginning it didn't do anything. It was, you know, like, I mean, if you put a dollar sign in front of like a number, it doesn't turn it into like money except in reading it. And so in a similar way, like I started to do this behavior. And then I wrote up this proposal on how I thought it could work on my blog. And I made a bunch of like mockups because I was a designer and essentially sort of showed what I thought like, you know, what, trending topics might look like that were modeled after Flickers explore.

And, you know, sent out the first tweet on, was it August 23rd, 2007, yes. Yes, and I believe I wrote the blog post actually maybe before. Was it true? What was it before? I don't remember. It was two days later. Whatever it was. After that all happened, I did go down to South Park and I walked into Twitter's headquarters.

I knew Blaine Cook, who's one of the engineers there, and I also sort of casually met some of the other engineers. and I knew Tony Stumblevine and folks like that. And I remember, you know, like, I talked to Biz Stone about this idea, and he was, you know, running between, you know, investor meetings or servers melting down or, like, whatever it was and, you know, sort of like try to be, you know, like, helpful. And I think I solved your problem for, like, groups and Twitter. And he was just, you know, when I explained to him, it was just like, you know, that's the nerdest idea I've ever heard.

It's never going to work. And, like, you know, because they'd sold blogger to Google, it just seemed to me that they were thinking about this as a Google-style problem. They're going to use an algorithm to figure out what a tweet is about. And then that'll be how they allow people to subscribe to their interest or whatever. And that just seemed like that was going to, first of all, take so long.

They can barely keep the service up and running. And two, I need a solution now. And three, I knew that there was a developer ecosystem that would build solutions for this. And so I could go convince those developers to support the hashtag before Twitter could even, like, you know, get itself out the gate. So once I was told no, well, again, that ficing is kind of like,

you know, picked up and I was like, all right, it's on, you know, like, let's make this happen. And part of it was just doing it myself and kind of playing with the format and trying to get people to see what it was. And then strangely, you know, like I reached out to, was it, Lauren Richter who built Tweedy, I think, and I told him about it and like echo phone and like, I don't know, there's a bunch of these, like, you know, app makers who I just reached out to directly. I sent to my blog post because that was like the documentation. And, Before long, it started like crop up in apps. I think the biggest moment for me was when some eyes, which was eventually acquired by Twitter

to provide Twitter search, added support for hashtags, like as a main feature, you know? And that sort of blew my mind because now there was like a serious, you know, sort of product out there that had money that was using this thing and that was seeing the value of it. That's interesting what you said. I don't remember the wording that you said, but it was the thing that you, the idea you had that worked. The thing that got that, like, it worked. Like, you're always throwing things out there and hoping that they get traction. But that's the simplest one, and it's the one that right. And I want to be clear, too, it wasn't like this just was like this divine epiphany.

Right, right. One of the things that I learned from Tontech, you know, he taught me, one of the other things that we were working on at the time was something called microformats of the idea of embedding data in web pages themselves inside the markup. And what he taught me was essentially the scientific method. So to understand who Tontica is, I don't know if you've talked to him, but he built, I believe, the rendering engine for Internet Explorer 5 on the Mac,

which was one of the best browsers from Microsoft of the time, maybe ever. And he's such a methodical thinker and his approach to everything is very principled. And so what he taught me was to document existing behavior. Like, see what people are already doing. Like, do the least, do the thing that requires the least amount of sort of,

new work or that requires people to learn something new or different than what they're already doing. And you can kind of like shimmy or nudge their behavior in the direction that you want. And so in a way, you know, I went out and I documented all the existing groups that were out there on the social web. I documented all these tags from Flickr. I documented what's happening on Wikipedia. I have this whole wiki, actually. You can check it out. I think it's Twitter.p.vWorks.com.

And there's a whole discussion there actually about the hashtag. tag and about groups. There were, I know Stowe Boyd is the guy that kind of came up with the term hashtag. Yeah, right. But Stephanie, I forget her name, they were all talking. There was a whole group of people talking about groups on Twitter. And I was just reading what they were saying. And they're like, just do groups like Flickr has them.

It'll solve a lot of our problems. And these are people who are using the web to use Twitter. And I was like, that's not what the future is. The future is these mobile devices. So it has to work for SMS. Like that's the constraint. and because I was able to like, you know, stay focused on that, it just sort of, I think, you know, fell out of the, you know, sort of like the root structure,

you know, all the sort of like soil like went away and it was like you can see clearly like what needed to happen. And then once I had that, it was easy for me to just keep advocating that. I mean, what turned out to be years. I mean, the New York Times wrote about the hashtag in, I think, 2011. So, you know, there's a four-year lag for this very sort of small idea. You know, for what it's worth, I was very reluctant for a long time to sort of acknowledge my contribution to this thing. I wanted this thing to live on its own, for it to be its own idea. And I didn't want it to be something that had come from a person.

I just wanted it to exist. But towards the run-up to Twitter's IPO, Twitter started to act as though they were going to own and trademark the hashtag. And, again, sort of in my open-source ethos way, I was like, you know, fuck that. I forgot that, yeah. You know, and so I took on this mantle. You know, it's sort of like, it was like my Batman moment where it's like, okay, like, I can't just kind of sit by and let this company own this thing when the whole point was to create a bigger ecosystem, to create a bigger pie, to create a different, like, if you think about if you have a sports,

if you have like a football team, but there are no other teams, like you're not going to make a lot of money. But if you create the NFL, like, that's amazing. And that's what I wanted to do with the social web. I want to there be, I mean, not that I follow sports ball that much, but like, you know, the NFL of, like, of social apps that are all interoperating and sharing together. Just like, you know, if you're a Verizon customer and I is AT&T, we can call each other. Yeah. Why can't we do that with a social web? Yeah.

You know? Yeah. And then here we are. We're ready to break the whole thing up. That's another right today, apparently. In the time that you'll allow, I'm going to, acknowledging I'm alighting over the next decade of your career. I'm curious, to what degree you're willing to talk about, what are you interested in right now? Because I feel like there's a sense of transition going on right now.

Yeah, you know, it's funny. This will probably freak out many of your listeners. But I went and I got an aura reading today at the Whitney. And like the woman of, you know, whether there's any scientific proof, it doesn't really matter. It's more like what it reflects or brings up to you in that moment. Yeah. You know, she's like, oh, you seem to be at a crossroads. I was like, oh, my God, it's so accurate.

Yeah, you know, like I packed all my stuff up in February. I became a digital nomad. My sort of dream, which I wrote about in 2006, to become like a vagabond hacker and be able to go anywhere in the world with these co-working spaces, like, you know, now is someone being realized. And what I'm both excited about and also have a lot of trepidations about is how human connection and relationships are changing and being reformed in the era of. of AI and machine learning. And I think the way that we, my current approach in thinking is like we need to do a lot more work to develop the connection of an individual

to him or herself, to sort of create a foundational place where you feel safe and secure. And then that'll create a better way for people to relate to each other, to interrelate to each other. And that then there's a context for sort of artificial intelligences or computerized entities that we will also have relationships with. And it's already happening, obviously, with the godbots, the Alexis and the Googles and so on.

But the relationships that, especially young people, are going to have to those products, are going to change the way the humans interact with each other. And if we think the outcomes of social media have been bad, or deleterious, to use a large word, I'm very concerned about the seductiveness of these artificial. intelligent agents.

In what way? I was at an event this week at BetoWorks called Synthetic Media and we're starting to create influencers that are pure CGI representations. Even the company that I worked on that I took through Y Combinator called Molly

was intended to sort of create an AI that knows about your friends in a way that Alexa and the Google assistant don't. And they're starting to be able to to, you know, you can imagine like if you just watch the conversations in dating apps, let's say. Like I have no idea what the privacy policy is around conversations on Tinder or something like that. But let's say those that are the most, you know, interesting or the most compelling

could be mined to create bots that are able to provide you with a dating experience. One behavior within dating apps that currently exists is that people will use these apps and they'll never actually meet up. They just, you know, find that there's some sort of human connection and they have a conversation and that's it. I know in Asia, having relationships with virtualized characters is very common and very normal. And at the same time, we seem to be going through this loneliness epidemic. And so you can sort of address that problem through virtualized relations. But then what does that do to the individual in terms of the ability to have conflict,

to manage conflict, to manage self-realization or growth or development? So there's this humane aspect that I'm really interested in in terms of where technology goes next and what it does to us and what we do to it. And one of the ways I've been thinking about this is to, I guess, ask the question of what would it mean for us to relax or remove the dichotomy that we think exists between ourselves and our technology? What if we think of ourselves as technology, you know, like human technology and we are upgrading ourselves in terms of our emotional capacity or our ability to empathize?

What if we went back 15 years and instilled the creators of, of the social media platforms that we all use today with more of these, with more EQ. What would the world look like? And so for me, it's very important to think about how we can do that now so that the generation that's creating, while we're on the cusp of creating the machine learning

and AI, you know, next-gen products, because a lot of the people who are in those fields are not doing it because they necessarily that care about or want to interact with, you know, the chaos and the randomness of human behavior. And yet that's what creates so much resilience in society and culture. And so unless we're actually designing for that and supporting those humane elements in our technology and software, we will eradicate it, which will actually make us less, will make us more susceptible, I think, to distortions in leadership and so on.

You're already seeing like a shift to the right in a way because the way that they communicate is more clearer than a more liberal approach, which is more diffuse and confusing and there's more context and that's harder to get in a soundlight. So those are all things that I'm concerned about, but I think, I'm hopeful that maybe AI, if we use it effectively, can actually, you know, solve for or preserve more of our humanity, even as we become more ensconced in that technological milieu. You said over text last night something about a Burning Man experience that put you on this path. Was that a joke? No, that was real. I mean, you don't have to share it, but I'm just curious. Well, I think it would be useful for your listeners. Right. We didn't quite go.

You know, we did gloss over quite a bit because after I left Google, you know, my, having lost the battle against Facebook, I kind of didn't know what to do with myself. And I was like, well, I don't have a mission anymore. Yeah. We lost. And so at that point, you know, I needed to go through a reboot personally and emotionally and discover myself, frankly. And although it's a cliche, you know, clichés come from somewhere. And so I did go to Burning Man.

And I had a number of formative experiences, both with alternative relationships and listed materials and so on. And I think developed this deeper sense of my capacity. I mean, the way that I succeeded in Silicon Valley for the first 10 years or so was by being much more rational and much more analytical. being very abstract and that was one of the problems that I had in high school where I just couldn't connect to the material because I was always thinking about big-picture things I think after bringing in for the next several years through a series of

both experiments and failures and so on in relationships and learning more about myself I become much more able to tap into I think my emotional side and to lean into a deeper affinity for and compassion for other humans and other people Human, it's happened to your humanity, which is what you were just talking about. Right. So I guess like Silicon Valley pushed us off to like the left side of the brain. And now I'm realizing obviously that, and it was always there, right? I started out as an artist that we need to actually shift back into the other direction,

into that chaos, into the unknown, into different ways of knowing than the purely rational. That that is where human experience sort of exists is between these two poles, this pendulum swinging back and forth. And so I think for the last several years I've been trying to develop and cult that within myself and in my relationships. And so Burning Man was a big turning point for that because it allowed me to stop being defined by the work that I had done, but by the person that I could become. And that was incredibly valuable and transformative for me.

And really, I think both changed and saved my life in a lot of ways. Well, I have absolutely no idea what that's going to lead to. But Chris, whatever it is, I'm sure it's going to be fascinating for you and for people watching. We'll be back here in 10 years and a lot of conversation about it. Thank you, sir. Yes, I appreciate it.