Zay California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the cube covering Hadoop summit 2016 brought to you by Hortonworks. Here's your host, John furrier. >>Okay, we'll come back here and we are here live in Silicon Valley for the cube. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the cylinders. Of course. We're here at the big data event. Hadoop summit 2016 have a special guest celebrity now, author of the bestselling book magical at Virginia Heffernan magic and loss rising on the bestseller lists. Welcome to the cube. Thanks in our show, you are my internet friend and now you're my real life friend. You're my favorite Facebook friend that I just now met for the first time. Great to meet you. We had never met and now we, but we know each other of course intimately through the interwebs. So I've been following your writing your time. Send you do some stuff on medium and then you, you kind of advertise. You're doing this book. I saw you do the Google glasses experiment in. >>It was Brooklyn and it might, it was so into Google glass and I will admit it, I fought for everything. I fell for VR and all its incarnations and um, and the Google last year, it was like that thing that was supposed to put the internet all voice activated, just put the internet always in front of your face. So I started to wear it around in Brooklyn, my prototype. I thought everyone would stop me and say how cool it was. In fact they didn't think it was pull it off new Yorkers. That's how you would, how they really feel. Got a problem with that. Um, your book magic and loss is fantastic and I think it really is good because uh, Dan Lyons wrote, disrupted, loved, which was fantastic. Dan lies big fan of him and his work, but it really, it wasn't a parody of civil rights for Silicon Valley. >>The show that's kinda taken that culture and made it mainstream. I had people call me up and say, Hey, you live in Callow Alto. My God, do you live near the house? Something like it's on Newell, which is one of my cross streets. But the point is tech culture now is kind of in a native, my youngest is 13 and you know, we're in an iPad generation for the youth and we're from the generation where there was no cell phones. And Mike, I remember when pages were the big innovation and internet. But I think, I think when I'm telling you, I think, I know I'm talking to a fellow traveler when I say that there was digital culture before the advent of the worldwide web in the early nineties you know, I, I'm sure you did too. Got electronic games like crazy. I would get any Merlin or Simon or whatever that they, they introduced. >>And then I also dialed into a mainframe in the late seventies and the early eighties to play the computer as we call it. We didn't even call it the internet. And the thing about the culture too was email was very, you know, monochrome screens, but again, clunky but still connected. Right? So we were that generation of, you know, putting that first training wheels on and now exposed to you. So in the book, your premise is, um, there's magical things happening in the internet and art countering the whole trolling. Uh, yeah, the Internet's bad. And we know recently someone asked me, how can the internet be art when Twitter is so angry? What do you think art is? You know, this is an art. Art is emotional. Artists know powerful >>emotions represented in tranquility and this is, you know, what you see on the internet all the time. Of course the aid of course are human. It needs a place to live and call it Twitter. For now it used to be YouTube comments. So, but we are always taking the measure of something we've lost. Um, I get the word loss from lossy compression, you know, the engineering term that, how does, how MP3 takes that big broad music signal and flattens it out. And something about listening to music on MP3, at least for me, made me feel a sense that I was grieving for something. It was missing something from my analog life. On the other hand, more than counterbalanced by the magic that I think we all experienced on the internet. We wouldn't have a friendship if it weren't for social media and all kinds of other things. And strange serendipity happens not to mention artistic expression in the form of photography, film, design of poetry and music, which are the five chapters of the book. >>So the book is fantastic. The convergence and connection of people, concepts, life with the internet digitally is interesting, right? So there's some laws with the MP3. Great example, but have you found post book new examples? I'm sure the internet culture, geese like Mia, like wow, this is so awesome. There's a cultural aspect of it is the digital experience and we see it on dating sites. Obviously you see, you know Snapchat, you know, dating sites like Tinder and other hookups apps and the real estate, everything being Uberized. What's the new things that you've, that's coming out and you must have some >>well this may be controversial, but one thing I see happening is anti digital culture. Partly as an epi phenomenon of side effect of digitization. We have a whole world of people who really want to immerse themselves in things like live music maker culture, things made by hand, vinyl records, vinyl records, which are selling more than ever in the days of the rolling stones. Gimme shelter less they sold less than than they do now. The rolling stones makes $1 billion touring a year. Would we ever have thought that in the, in the, you know, at the Genesis of the iPod when it seemed like, you know, recorded music represented music in that MP3 thing that floated through our, our phones was all we needed. No, we want to look in the faces of the rolling stones, get as close as we can to the way the music is actually made and you know, almost defiantly, and this is how the culture works. This is how youth culture works. Um, reject, create experiences that cannot be digitized. >>This is really more of a counter culture movement on the overt saturation of digital. >>Yes. Yes. You see the first people to scale down from, you know, high powered iPhones, um, when we're youth going to flip phones. You know, it's like the greatest like greatest punk, punk, punk tech. Exactly. It's like, yeah, I'm going to use these instruments, but like if I break a string, who cares on a PDs? The simplest one, right? >>My mom made me use my iPhone. Are we going to, how are we going to have that? it'd >>be like, Oh, look at you with your basic iPhone over there. And I've got my just like hack down, downscale, whatever. And you know what, I don't spend the weekends, don't pick up my phone on the weekends. But you know, there are interesting markets there. And interesting. I mean, for instance, the, you know, the live phenomenon, I know that, you know, there's this new company by one of the founders of Netflix movie pass, which um, for a $30 subscription you've seen movies in the theater as much as you want and the theaters are beautiful. And what instead of Netflix and chill, you know, the, the, the contemporary, you know, standard date, it's dinner and movie. You're out again. You're eating food, which can't be digitized with in-company, which can't be digitized. And then sitting in a theater, you know, a public experience, which is, um, a pretty extraordinary way that the culture and business pushes back on digital. >>Remember I was a comma on my undergraduate days in computer science in the 80s. And before when it was nerdy and eh, and there was a sociology class at Hubba computers and social change. And the big thing was we're going to lose social interactions because of email. And if you think about what you're talking about here is that the face to face presence, commitment of being with somebody right now is a scarce resource. You have an abundance of connections. >>I mean, take the fact what has happened is digital culture has jacked up the value of undigital culture. So for instance, you know, I've, I've met on Facebook, we talk on Facebook messenger, we notice that we're, you know, like kindred spirits in a certain way and we like each other's posts and so forth. Then we have an, a more extensive talk in messenger when we meet in person for the first time. Both of us are East coast people, but we hugged tele because it's like, Oh wow, like you in the flesh. You know it's something exciting. >>Connection virtually. That's right. There's a synchronous connection presence, but we're not really, we haven't met face to face. >>Yeah, there's this great as a great little experiment going on, set group of kids and Silicon Valley have decided they're too addicted to their phones and Facebook. Now I am not recommending for your viewers and listeners that anybody do what these kids sounds good, are ready. Go. Hey, all right, so what they do is take an LSD breakfast. Now I don't take drugs. I think you can do this without the LSD, but they put a little bit of a hallucinogen under their skin in the morning and what they find is they lost interest in the boring interface in their phones because people on the bus suddenly looked so fascinating to them. The human face is an ratable interface. It can't be reproduced anywhere, Steve. You know, Johnny ive can't make it. They can't make it at Google. And that I think is something we will see young markets doing, which is this renewed appreciation for nature and analog for humans and for analog culture. >>That's right. The Navy is going to sextants and compasses. You may have seen training, they're training sailors on those devices because of the fear that GPS might be hacked. So you know, the young kids probably don't even know what a cup is is, well, I bought myself a compass recently because I suddenly was like, you know, we talk a lot about digital technology, but what the heck, this thing you can point toward the poles, right in my hands. You know, I was suddenly like, we are this floating ball with these poles with different magnetic charges. And I think it's time. I appreciate it. >>Okay, so I've got to ask the, um, the, the feedback that you've gotten from the book, um, again, we hear that every Geneva magic and loss, great, great book. Go by. It's fantastic and open your mind up. It's a, it's a thought provoking, but really specific good use cases. I got a think that, you know, when you talk at Google and when you talk to some of the groups that you're talking to, certainly book clubs and other online that there must be like, Oh my God, you hit the cultural nerve. What have you heard from some of these, um, folks from my age 50 down to the 20 something year olds? Have you had any aha moments where you said, Oh my God, I hit a nerve here. >>Did not want to, I mean, I didn't want to write one of those books. That's like the one thing you need to know to get your startup to succeed or whatever. You know, I was at the airport and every single one of them is like, pop the only thing you need to do to save this or whatever. And they, they do take a very short view. Now if you're thinking about, you know, whether if you're thinking about your quarterly return or your, you know, what you're going to do this quarter and when you're going to be profitable or user acquisition, those books are good manuals. But if you're going to buy a hardcover book and you're going to really invest in reading every page, not just the bolded part, not just the put, you know, the two points that you have to know. I really wanted readers and at what I had found on the internet, people like you, we have an interest in a long view. You know what, I need a really long view >>in a prose that's not for listicle or you know, shorts. It's like it's just a thought provoker but somebody can go, Hey, you know, at the beach on the weekend say, Hey wow, this is really cool. What F you know, we went analog for awhile or what if, what's best for my kids to let my kids play multiplayer games more Zika simulate life. That was my, so these are the kinds of questions that the digital parents are asked. >>Yeah. So you know, like let's take the parents question, which is, is, you know, a, surprisingly to me it's a surprisingly pressing question. I am a parent, but my kids' digital habits are not, you know, of obsessive interest to me. Sometimes I think the worry about our kids is a proxy for how we worry about ourselves. You know, it's funny because they're the, you know, the model of the parent saying my kid has attention deficit order, zero order. My kid has attention deficit disorder. The kids over here, the parents here, you know, who has the attention deficit disorder. But in any case I have realized that parents are talking about uh, computers on the internet as though something kids have to have a very ambivalent relationship with and a very wary relationship with. So limit the time, and it sounds a little bit like the abstinence movement around sexuality that like, you know, you only dip in, it's very, you know, they're only date, right, right, right. >>Instead of joining sides with their kids and helping to create a durable, powerful, interesting online avatar, which is what kids want to do. And it's also what we want to do. So like in your Facebook profile, there are all kinds of strategic groups you can make as a creator of that profile. We know it as adults. Like, do you, some people put up pictures of their kids, some people don't vacation pictures. Some people promote the heck out of themselves. Some people don't do so much of that. Um, do you put up a lot of photographs? Do whatever. Those are the decisions we started to make when went on Facebook at kitchen making the two small armor to have on their gaming profile. That's kind of how they want to play, you know, play for you, going to wear feathers. These are important things. Um, but the uh, you know, small questions like talking to your kids and I don't mean a touchy feely conversation, but literally during the write in all lower case commit, you know, Brighton, all lower case, you're cute and you're this and that means a certain thing and you should get it and you're going to write in all caps and you're going to talk about white nationalist ideology. >>Well that also has a set of consequences. What have you learned in terms of the virtual space? Actually augmented reality, virtual reality, these promise to be virtual spaces. What, what is one of them? They always hope to replicate the real world. The mean, yes. Will there be any parallels of the kind of commitment in the moment? Gives you one thing. I say kids that, you know, the subtitle of the book is the internet as art, magic and loss. The internet is art and the kind of art, the internet is, is what I think of as real estate art. It purports to be reality. You know, every technology pick a photography film says or think of even the introduction of a third dimension in painting, you know, in Renaissance painting perspective for ports to represent reality better than it's been represented before. And if you're right in sync with the technology, you're typically fooled by it. >>I mean, this is a seductive representation of reality. You know, people watching us now believe they're seeing us flush of let us talk. You know, they don't think they're seeing pixels that are designed in certain ways and certainly it's your ways. So trying to sort out the incredibly interesting immersive, artful experience of being online that has some dangers and has some emotions to do it from real life is a really important thing. And you know, for us to learn first and then a model for our kids. So I had a horrible day on Twitter one day, eight 2012 213 worst day ever on Twitter. It was a great day for me. I spent the day at the beach, my Twitter avatar took sniper fire for me all day. People called her an idiot separated amount. I separated them out. And anyone who like likes roleplay and games knows that like I'm not a high priestess in Dentons and dragons. >>You know, I'm a much smaller person than that. And in, in, you know, in the case of this Twitter battle, I'm a less embattled person than the one that takes your armor from me on Twitter. That's my art. Your armor. So let's talk about poetry. Twitter, you mentioned poetry, Twitter, 140 characters. I did 40 characters is a lot. If like a lot of internet users your to have pictographic language like Chinese. So 140 characters is a novel by, well not a novel, but it's a short story for, you know, a writer of short form, short form Chinese aphorisms like Confucius. So one of the things I wanted to say is there's nothing about it being short that makes it low culture. You know, there's, I mean it takes a second to take, to take an a sculpture or to take an a painting and yet like the amount of craft that went into that might be much more good tweeting and you're excellent at it, um, is not easy. You know, I know that times I've been like, I tagged the wrong person and then I have to delete it. Like, because the name didn't come up or you know, I get the hashtags wrong and then I'm like, Oh, it would have been better this other way or I don't have a smart enough interject >>it's like playing sports. Twitter's like, you know, firing under the tennis ball baseline rallies with people. I mean, it's like, it's like there's a cultural thing. And this is the thing that I love about your book is you really bring in the metaphors around art and the cultural aspect. Have you had any, have you found that there's one art period that we represent right now? That it could be a comparison? >>I mean, you know, it's always tempting to care everything to the Renaissance. But you know, obviously in the Italian Renaissance there was so much technological innovation and so much, um, and so much, uh, so much artistic innovation. But, um, you know, the other thing are the Dawn of it's might be bigger than that, which it sounds grounds grandiose, but we're talking about something that nearly 6 billion people use and have access to. So we're talking about something bigger than we've ever seen is the Donovan civilization. So like, we pay a lot of attention to the Aqua docks and Rome and, and you know, later pay to touch it to the frescoes. I attend in this book to the frescoes, to the sculpture, to the music, to the art. So instead of talking about frescoes as an art historian, might I talk about Instagram? Yeah. >>And you, and this thing's all weave together cause we can back to the global fabric. If you look at the civilization as you know you're not to use the world is flat kind of metaphor. But that book kind of brings out that notion of okay if you just say a one global fabric, yes you have poetry, you have photography of soiling with a Johnny Susana ad in London. He says, you know, cricket is a sport in England, a bug and a delicacy depending on where in the world you are. >>Love that is that, I wonder if that's the HSBC had time to actually a beautiful HSBC job has done a beautiful campaign. I should find out who did it about perspective. And that is also a wonderful way to think about the internet because you know, I know a lot of people who don't like Twitter, who don't like YouTube comments. I do like them because I am perpetually surprised at what people bring to their interpretation. Insights in the comments can be revealing. You know, you know, you don't wanna get your feelings hurt. Sometimes you don't want that much exposure to the micro flora and fauna of ideas that could be frightening. But you know, when you're up for it, it's a really nice test of your immune system, you know. All right. So what's next for you? Virginia Heffernan magic and last great book. I think I will continue to write the tech criticism, which is just this growing field. I at Sarah Watson had a wonderful piece today in the Columbia journalism review about how we really need to bring all our faculties to treat, treating to tech criticism meant and treating tech with, um, with Karen, with proper off. Um, and the next book is on anti digital culture. Um, I will continue writing journalism and you'll see little previews of that book in the next work. >>Super inspirational. And I think the culture needs this kind of rallying cry because you know, there is art and science and all this beautiful beauty in the internet and it's not about mutually exclusive analog world. You can look and take, can come offline. So it's interesting case study of this, this revolution I think, and I think the counter culture, if you'd go back and Southern John Markoff about this, when he wrote his first book, the Dormouse wander about the counter culture in Silicon Valley is what's your grade book? And counter cultures usually create a another wave of innovation. So the question that comes out of this one is there could, this could be a seminal moment in history. I mean, I think it absolutely is. You know, in some ways, every moment is a great moment if you know what to make of it. But I am just tired of people telling us that we're ruining our brands and that this is the end of innovation and that we're at some low period. >>I think we will look back and think of this as an incredibly fertile time for our imaginations. If we don't lose hope, if we keep our creativity fired and if we commit to this incredible period we're in Virginia. Thanks for spending the time here in the queue. Really appreciate where you're live at. Silicon Valley is the cube with author Virginia Heffernan magic. And loss. Great book. Get it. If you don't have it, hard copies still available, get it. We'll be right back with more live coverage here. This is the cube. I'm John furry right back with more if the short break.