The Future of the Internet—
And How to Stop It
Jonathan Zittrain
Yale University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0300124873
$30.00

Jonathan Zittrain’s fantastic new book introduces the concept of generativity—a technology’s capacity to allow other things to be built on top of —and shows how the pendulum swing between generative tools and tethered single-purpose devices has been the story of the history of personal computing and the Internet. Each cycle of innovation has seen a creative flourishing as innovators build on each other’s work, and then a lockdown as the risks of openness (spam, viruses, phishing) become too great.

Generativity is a tremendously useful concept because it cuts across the familiar debates around open-source software, and takes in not just code but content and the network itself: Zittrain’s lon-gest case study is Wikipedia. However, the category is simultaneously so broad and so narrow that it cries out for further definition. For exam-

ple, I would’ve liked to see Zittrain address the nuances of calling Windows a generative OS, when it clearly has both generative and tethering tendencies.

Zittrain acknowledges that, as one of his early readers noted, adding a million tethered TiVos to a network that contains a million generative PCs doesn’t make those PCs less generative. But he worries that as the risks of generativity grow ever greater in the age of botnets, the pendulum will swing too far toward tethering, leaving generative technology in the hands of only a few geeky acolytes. Although I agree that the generative principles at the heart of the Internet should be better defended (and wish this book had more concrete suggestions for how to do that), I think there is also an argument to be made that the

pendulum has swung too far toward generativity to ever be lost.

The mashup spirit of Web
2.0 has created new expecta-
tions for some form of genera-
tivity as a baseline. Email and
the Web made jailbreaking the
most famously tethered recent
device, the first-generation
iPhone, accessi-
ble to nongeeks
worldwide.
Even hardware
hacking is
undergoing a
renaissance (see
cover story pg.
18), as people
seek to make
the physical
world as gen-
erative as the
digital one has
been. Zittrain’s
warnings are
well-taken, and

just in formulating his argument he moves the debate on the future of the Internet further in promising directions. But it seems to me that generativity is as inherent in the toolmakers as in the tools, and that’s reason for some cautious optimism.