Following is the full text of Kano cofounder Alex Klein’s talk titled “Codes We Live By” at TEDxTeen 2014 conference.
TRANSCRIPT:
A lot of us didn’t know what we wanted to be when we grew up.
You wanted to be a dinosaur, and then, the next day, you wanted to be a doctor. And then you wanted to be a doctor that operates on dinosaurs, and it all starts swirling around, and that’s what’s so fun about being a kid.
But then, what happens is that some lines start to be drawn: “Oh, she’s creative!”, “He’s mathy,” left-brain, right-brain, and then, the educational system and our parents tend to arrive at the party with some code names and some code words that we live through.
Our GD, our BA, our MA, our MBA, maybe you’ll be GOP one day. And then you’ll go down the road exchanging code names for each other until eventually, you know, RIP.
So, a year ago I was a writer, and I was writing about things like Occupy Wall Street, and Mitt Romney, and Scientology, and the tech industry, and the connections therein, and I dropped it all.
I dropped all of those codes as instruction booklets and I started working with a group of amazing people in London on a different kind of computer, on a PC you make yourself, like Lego. Something that you can build and code with the simplicity and fun of a game.
And here’s one I made earlier, as they say on the cooking shows.
Now, the original idea for this project came from a conversation with my 7-year-old cousin, Micah. Like me, when asked what he wants to be when he grows up, he goes, “Pff!”
But what he does know is that he wants to build things and make things.
And he said, “A computer.”
And I was like, “Dude.”
And he was like, “No, really, a computer.”
I said, “OK, well, that sounds kind of difficult.”
He said, “No, it shouldn’t be difficult, it should be easy. Nobody should tell me how to do it, I should be able to do it myself.”
He basically said that it has to be as simple and fun as Lego. And me and my friend Yonatan, at the time, were amazed by this.
We were totally unqualified to take on this challenge. I was a writer, an amateur designer, I wrote code the way you might write a text at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night, which is to say, quite sloppily.
Yonatan was an awesome guy working in the plastics industry and a snowboarder. But we got to work doing this, and here you see the final piece coming together.
It was based on some existing technology, called the Raspberry Pi, a $35 Linux board invented in Cambridge, where I was doing my master’s degree. We got to work and this is what eventually came out of it.
There was a book that gave a simple story about how computers work, and by the end, “Hey! A computer!”
And this is Micah and Jess. As someone who loves words — like a lot of the speakers who have appeared today — I started with the word ‘computer,’ and I think it’s a really interesting one because it’s really misunderstood.
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400 years ago, a computer was a person, a person that you paid to do calculations for you. So you’d be like, “He’s a computer, she’s a computer.” Interesting.
And then, 200 years ago, when the computer was coming into being it was made out of levers and gears. And when you actually start thinking about it, a computer can be made out of anything, anything at all. Anything that can speak in a language that can accept rules and instructions.
You can even make the basic building blocks of a computer out of an audience, and that’s what I’m going to try and do with you now.
So if you would all take out your phones, if they’re not already out, and I’m going to give a little code, a little set of instructions that’ll allow us together to become what’s called a binary array, which is the building block of the computer.
It sounds complicated, what it really is, is a series of ‘yes’s and ‘no’s.
So I’m going to ask you two questions, if the answer is ‘yes’ to my question, turn on your screen like this, your phone screen.
So, as a test I would say: “Can you guys hear me right now?”
[Audience: Yes.]
But you just need the screen, don’t even have to say yes, it’s magic!
My first question for those of you who have your binary array out right now. Who here has seen the inside of a smartphone, ever? Interesting, interesting, OK.
My second question is: who here believes in magic? Which is also by the way a classic 60s song!
Do you believe in magic?
Interesting.
OK, so what we just did, although it seems kind of simple, we took a binary array and we performed a logical operation in it. The way computers think, their language, their words, is just a series of ‘yes’s and ‘no’s. I’ve always found that quite interesting and quite fundamental.
For those of you who said you’d never seen the inside of your smartphones, and who also said that they don’t believe in magic, I’m going to try and switch their brain around a little bit.
So, let me ask you this: what’s more magic than a sealed black box with a hermetic glass screen that you’ve never seen the inside of, perhaps you’ve no idea how it works, but’s slapped to your thigh most of time, it can connect you to all conceivable human info, to any human being that you’re ever met, that has more processing, and calculating power than that took us to the Moon on the Apollo?
What could be more magic than that? The problem is today, magic is a word we use for things that we don’t have words for, right? You call something magic when you don’t really have the right words to put it together.
In the world now, a tiny 1% of 1% has the words for computing. There’s this bubbling surging conversation of ideas, of rhythm, and motion going on at our thighs that almost none of us have access to, none of us have an ability to change and shape.
The most powerful, creative tool ever unleashed on the mind and soul of mankind is pretty much locked away, in a few sealed hubs, in Silicon Valley and a few other places, including London.
So there are 4.5 billion of these guys including laptops, smartphones, tablets, in the world, half of them are connected to the Internet, and astonishingly, none of us really have this simple, fun way to make them play.
This kind of brought us, me and Yonatan, my co-founder, back to Micah’s question: “Why shouldn’t a computer be as simple as this? Why shouldn’t the basic building blocks, the codes that allow a computer to think and work, why couldn’t they be like Lego?
If you zoomed in to this, the Raspberry Pi, all the way down here, what you would see is something not too dissimilar from what you just saw in the audience, switches turning on and off, representing ‘yes’s and ‘no’s.
What really matters in the end is the question, the input you give it. People think of this as alien, people think of this as something separate from us, but in fact it’s a mind and meaning machine, operating in ‘yes’s and ‘no’s, switches on and off like the neurons in your brain.
And it’s amazing the way we’re so connected to them and yet so distant and so mysterious. So, me and Yonatan, despite being totally, totally unqualified we dropped everything, we moved to London, and we started building and making.
I started teaching myself to code, to program that is, Yonatan flew to China, checked out the biggest electronics bazaar in the world, in Changxing. We started stuffing stuff into two hundred boxes, we wrote a simple book that you saw on the video, a story that began with the words: “This is your little computer. It looks a bit complicated, but you can make it yourself and use all its powers.”
So we folded all these boxes, I got tons of paper cuts, and then we went around to schools across the UK, we started testing it and something quite magical happened.
Like many of you, the kids, when we came in, hadn’t seen the inside of a computer, they’d no idea how it worked, but in an hour, with a simple story, open source tools, and nice design, and a sense of humanity, you could have them making computers, making games, building open source songs on synthesizers.
One kid after a workshop, we ask them how they feel, he says, “I feel like God!” Jesus! That’s amazing! “I feel like God.”
We should all be so lucky. Yonatan and I were working on this, and then something strange happened. We looked out across the Internet, and we found that there were other sort of misfits, people who didn’t really know what they wanted to be when they grew up, who this idea resonated with, combining software and hardware in a way that feels human, putting things together so that the creative capacity is in the front seat rather than the consumptive one.
There was Matthew, a Welsh open source wizard who’d been teaching techno-camps across the UK. There was a Swedish designer who’s drawing pixel-perfect paintbrushes and anime characters.
There was a guy working at Sony who was making games, designing software for the PlayStation 4, who was cheating on the PlayStation 4 on the side and making Xbox games.
So all these misfits got together, we had a bit of money, we got a loan from Micah’s dad to buy two hundred of these and we started working. There were no titles, we started teaching each other.
So on November 19, we all got together, and we thought, we want to make a thousand more, the kids love it, there’s a resonance, we want a thousand more, we’re going to go to Kickstarter.
At the time these cost us 90 bucks to make. We said: “OK, can we please from the community, raise $100,000 to make a thousand of these and just keep testing, keep improving, keep seeing how far the rabbit hole goes, as Morpheus said in The Matrix?”
And on November 19 we hit the button and something kind of crazy happened. The numbers kept going up. We hit the $100,000 goal in about 12 hours. It was a 30-day campaign, that’s how long we thought it would take.
I hopped on a plane to come back here to New York to show my friends and family what I’d been working on, by the time I’d landed, we were at $250,000.
By the end of the campaign, we were at $1,500,000 with 13,000 backers from 50 countries around the world, including Steve Wozniak, which just blew my mind.
So, we thought there was something there, combining storytelling and tech, combining the intuitiveness of a plug-and-play Lego set with an open source computer, and start bringing these ideas back to earth, into a world that feels more ‘computer arts’ than ‘computer sciences’.
So I mean, why did we get that far? I think it’s because today, when people talk about computing and learning to code and technology, the vocabulary, the words we use are so impoverished, we talk about STEM, and digital literacy, and ICT skills, and we’re basically giving kids a message that you need to learn how to code, or you are going to be unemployed and enslaved by legions of Google-Glass-wearing Agent Smiths.
We’ve started to think of computing as this purely technical vocational skill, and what Kano tried to do was make it feel creative again.
So, I want to talk about, quickly, because I think it’s important, other codes that we live by that we don’t even realize. Obviously, this is a code. The Roman alphabet, the Latin alphabet, encodes sounds that we make.
A code is just a signifier, one thing to another, like your flicking switches for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Putting this together in interesting ways leads to words. This is a fork of an existing code base, the Greek alphabet, which is in itself a fork of all written alphabets that came before, all the way back to cuneiform, the original, the OG written language.
So then, of course, there’s our standard, decimal number system and the timetables, one of the first things we ever learn.
If you’re good at this, be careful, because the world will tell you’re mathy and then that’s it, they won’t let you do anything else, because we need people like that, unfortunately.
Here’s another code people don’t always think about, the musical staff. I mean, that is a code, a way of representing certain instructions that we can breathe through instruments, or really, now, through computers as well.
And what we’ve found is when you try and play in just one of these, and you narrow your mind to just one of these, the musical staff, the alphabet, numbers, you end up producing stuff that’s kind of bad, kind of formulaic.
What’s sweet is when you start bashing these code bases against one another. That’s what starts to get things going.
A great example: we have GZA in the house today, like, “Oh my God!” But GZA and rap music, a combination of many code bases, it does have this quality of merging and funneling between multiple code bases.
I’ll give an example from GZA, if he doesn’t mind, it goes: “If you livin’ in the world today, you be hearin’ all the slang that the Wu-Tang say.”
If I had done that in the alphabet it might go something like, “Well, if you’re alive in the 21st century, it’s quite likely that you may have heard the non-traditional vocabulary used by the members of the Wu-Tang clan.”
The first computer programmer was a woman, but she was working on one of these clacking gears computers in Great Britain, she was the daughter of Lord Byron, maybe, the original, abstract poet incognito. Lady Ada Lovelace called computer programming ‘the poetical science.’
I thought that was kind of beautiful.
Finally one last code. This is from a cave painting about 10,000 years old, this is kind of a weird interest of mine, in Mexico. These handprints on the wall are what anthropologists and academics who study ancient art think of as the first code for a human being, the first symbol for a person.
Now, this comes into being about 10,000 years ago contemporaneous with writing, as people are breathing art onto the walls around them, as they’re starting to wake up to the sense they’re more than animals.
Maybe as a little side note, we were counting earlier with ones and zeros, switches on our phones…People think that’s different, the way a computer thinks is a very stark. But the only reason we count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 in a decimal system is because we have ten fingers, right?
Which has always kind of surprised me, we could have been so different in so many ways and the codes that we inherit, they often restrict us more than we think.
The other story I’ll just drop speaking of mixing code bases, I have a friend who started as a philosopher and now studies monkeys, like real monkeys, not even in the abstract.
He’s shown that monkeys, despite their many similarities to us – these are chimpanzees – do not learn for learning’s sake alone. They learn to get another candy or avoid whatever horror we inflict upon them in these labs; that’s a real downer.
But we’re the only things that do that, we’re the only things that absorb new codes just for the heck of it, and I think that’s quite cool.
So this is how, at least at Kano, we’ve approached coding. We’ve plugged it into games, computer programming. We combine visual blocks with the real code that is outputted at the side that is Python, and then it gets pumped into a game, or into a music piece of software, or to something that will pull a video or paint a picture.
And often it’s seeing the code and being able to move it in a way that is visual, that feels human rather than abstract, that gives kids the ability to make a lava volcano like you just saw, not just play by the rules of Minecraft, but to break them, to re-imagine them.
So, very quickly, you saw the code on the screen something you probably never see, that Python, I want to talk very quickly about openness. I think we’re moving, in some ways, into an age of openness and an age of connectivity.
I remember the first time I have ever got interested in what the inside of a computer looks like, I said I was quite anxious, I have an addictive personality.
When I was little, I memorized the whole script of The Matrix, and I was addicted to my screen, I couldn’t stop on the screens, and someone very near and dear to me, in a big argument, lifted up my iBook at the time, walked outside very proudly and slammed it on the ground.
It burst into these pieces, I was devastated obviously, I walked outside, I started piecing through it, a bit like Golum, looking for the hard drive, because I’d heard somewhere that the hard drive is where all the ideas are kept, that’s where my ideas were, my stories. But I could never find the hard drive because I didn’t know what it looked like, and without a computer I had no way of looking up what it looked like, which is kind of a catch-22.
This is a picture taken from the International Space Station of Africa. Half a billion people coming online in the next decade in Africa. Don’t let anyone tell you about the emerging world, it’s already emerged.
Of the top ten cities on Facebook I think one is American, and this is a new invention generation rising now; they’re using open tools, pulling things out of the trash to make instruments, to make radio stations.
This is a world we could’ve never anticipated five years ago even, and yet, it’s appearing before our eyes.
And now a word on the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS, until recently, ran on proprietary Windows software designed in a hermetically sealed lab, much like many of your phones, but a year ago switched, it switched its heart and soul, its ideas, its software to Linux, which is open source; and that means anyone can download it for free, amateurs, hobbyists, can fork it, they can change it.
I’ve always found it very beautiful, the idea that as the world opens, as code bases are shared in places that had never been anticipated. The models that we are using to build our greatest achievements, the International Space Station, are free, and open, and built by people who didn’t need codes after their names, they didn’t need those signs, those labels those affirmations, they built them themselves just for the heck of it because they wanted to make and play with something new.
Now, for our own story, Kano, and I’ll wrap it up quickly, we’re terrified, because we have to now ship over 13,000 kits, and it’s now up to 20,000, to all these countries around the world, and with it you can build a computer, you can start to code.
The software that we run on, that you can manipulate, Didi and Linux, is the same software that runs the International Space Station. We never thought that this story would end up here, and what we have to do now – and for an anxious person like me it can be quite difficult – is admit ignorance and say: “We hope and pray that what is created with our kits, with the computer that you make yourself, we never expect it, we hope and pray that you’ll surprise us.”
Eventually, this won’t be the exception, but the norm, I think. The computer arts, we have to bring them into our society, or we’re going to lose another generation who thinks it’s all about program or be programed, join the machine or fight against it.
I guess I should close with the words of Morpheus again; Neo is saying, he’s very glum, he says, “I don’t believe in magic.”
And Morpheus says, “Well, you know, a computer, what you can do with a computer is incredible because you don’t use it like a tool, you use it like a part of yourself.”
I think that’s what we all can do in the years to come.
Thank you.
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