steven johnson, bestselling science writer talks about the cyberworld, popular culture in computer networking as a political tool. mr. johnson is the author of eight nonfiction natural history of innovation" and "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age". >> steven johnson, in your newest book "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age," you use the term pier progressive. what is that? >> guest: my attempt to come up with a term for this new political philosophy that i see emerging all-around me. the book is a serious story about people trying to change the world and advance progress and who don't complete refit the existing model that we have between the democrats and republicans and they believe in many ways that the way that the internet was built, the way that the web was built and things like wikipedia were built using collaborative peer network for people and coming together and openly collaborating and building ideas, that is the tremendous engine for progress and growth. but it doesn't involve big government and doesn't involve capitalism. when you believe in this kind of system you don't believe in the traditional painters of the left or the right. i felt it was time we had a category to describe these people, so here progressive is what i came up with. >> host: post central authority, posted a decentralized authority. >> the way that the internet was built and the way the web was built, partially the result of visionary government funding which we have heard a lot about since the early days from there was funding that came to the government. the internet was built by loose collaborative networks without any traditional leaders, without any bureaucrats and built by people who were not actually working for big private corporations and free of the building on each other's ideas and refining those ideas and sharing them. this is one of these things if we did in having this conversation 40 years ago you would say that is a lovely utopian idea and it would work well in a commune in california when you are making baskets but this is the way the internet was built and the way the web was built and the lot of technology underlying the entire world was built. we can now point to that collaboration sometimes called your production, the structure of the peer network and say it works. it build things that are globally important and have transformed the world. >> host: what connects them? you wrote in "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age" to via pier progressive is to believe in the power of markets, to be a pier progressive is to believe the key to continued progress lies in building your networks in as many regions of modern life as possible. with a need arises in society issued building peer network. >> guest: peer progressives believe in the power of markets because when it works well is it a decentralized course. this is a principle that i take very seriously from a libertarian school of thought which is that a decentralized system will outperform a top-down conceptually planned system. this is an insect from the austrian economist hayek. the world is so complicated, because of the economy is so complicated, the city is so complicated, trying to understand it is too hard for a small group of centrally located planners to be able to do that. no individual person has to understand the whole thing. the market works because everyone understands a little bit of it. >> host: milton friedman's pencil. >> buying and selling and creating, the totality of these agents coming up with new solutions meeting people's needs. networks are a peer market where peer progressives defer from traditional libertarians is we don't think markets solve every problem in society. there are many facets of human experience that are not necessarily solve by markets. markets create their own problems. there are a lot of companies trying to build a global network that would unite computers around the world and they all failed compared to this open source peer produce solution of the internet and the web and wikipedia and other things. there are places you can use that without it involving traditional market relations and that is what peer progressives are trying to do. >> host: what is the chicken done? >> guest: the book starts with an opening preface in society, to understand, and in -- misinterpret where they come from. aviation safety, it has become astonishingly -- in a commercial airplane. it is this extraordinary thing. but we don't hear that much about it because there is this bias in the media and in our own minds against stories of steady incremental progress, where something in society gets better 1% or 2% year which over time, amazing breakthroughs. the headline of this thing is 1% better than last year is the most boring new site in the world so people don't write about it. when the plane goes down, when the plane doesn't go down something to report, we don't hear about that. in the book i talk about associated by commercial airplane you are more likely to be elected president of the united states than to survive a commercial airplane crash. the example i give in the book is a story of the miracle on the hudson. i am winding my way to the chicken gun. when the u.s. air flight when did in the hudson and everyone survived by father was very telling how the media chose to cover this event. there are two ways they covered it. first there was the super hero pilot who indeed was an amazing pilots and did an amazing job and this language of the miracle on the hudson, like the super natural event. what people didn't focus on nearly enough was the plane. the plane performed admirably during this event and it did so in a couple levels. when the geese collided with the jet engine they didn't explode, didn't shatter or send shards of titanium causing the plane to break down. that is partially because every jet engine that is on every model of jet engine on any commercial aircraft is tested with this thing called the chicken gone where they sit and they fire frozen chicken carcasses into a spinning jet engine to make sure it can handle life without exploding and shattering. that is your taxpayer dollars at work. this is a government initiative and everyone on that plane was very glad those chickens were tested to make sure those engines could survive. the other thing going on was the in in survive and kept the enough power to power the electronics. that enables the flyby wire system in the airbus 320 to give sullenberger all the systems which were key to his success and the flyby wire system was developed by nasa, and the airbus models it in the 320 and it was a huge part of the success of that landing but because there wasn't a single hero to point to we didn't -- you can't put a thousand engineers on the cover of time magazine so you put one person on the cover of time magazine but so often, tinkering and improving and modifying with thousands of mines working on a problem like how the make an airplane, really what is responsible for the progress we have in society. this is what i try to do with a lot of books, to tell stories of group collaboration where people come from different backgrounds and work to make the world better place. >> host: you write i suspect in the long run the media bias against stories of incremental progress may be more damaging than any bias the media displays towards the political left or right. >> i have a social studies quizzes of other key indices of social health over the last 20 or 30 years and the question to the reader is how do you think we have been ferrying as a society in the united states on different points on everything from violent crime to divorce rates to automobile fatalities to air pollution, 10 or 15 of these things and every single one of them over the last 20 years there has been dramatic positive change, in many cases 40% over that period. we just don't hear about that particular side of our society because for whatever reason it is not newsworthy. you are more likely to get attention by telling a story of slow and steady climb than was slow and steady progress. it may be that there is a bias in our own mind which the news media just reflecting. one thing i came across in this book when i was researching that shocked me was crime. the story of crime in the united states the last 20 years may be the most extraordinary social development in that period, incredibly optimistic story. it is amazing, new york has attention of the number of murders it had in 1990. this is generally a national trend with incredible improvement. that is something the media has reported a little bit. the tipping point, you do see stories about the new york success story, but for the last five years gallup has been asking is crime getting better or worse? despite that coverage and despite the positive news more americans think crime is getting worse year after year even though it is not true. people just assume things have gotten worse even when the evidence is staring them in the face. >> host: you alluded to this earlier, you do have this scene in most all of your books and this points it ou from "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age," most new movements are this way. hundreds of thousands of individuals in groups working in different fields in different locations start thinking about change using a common language without necessarily recognizing those shared values. start falling your own vector propelled along by the people in your media vicinity and one day look up and realize all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave against network of human intelligence. >> guest: it is the theme of all the books bus "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age" is most pronounced because the fun thing about "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age" is it is about something that hasn't fully happened yet. is an emerging movement that doesn't even full the have a name which is why i am trying to figure a way to describe it but you do get that point as an observer where you can look around and start to say i am seeing interesting people working on projects and in the case of "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age" people working in cities or things like patent reform or new ways to fund prescription drugs or experimenting with new ways to collaborate on the internet so it is a lot of different fields and the book is made of different stories of different fields and it is still very early in the game with all these developments so "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age" is kind of a short book. i wrote it not to be fully comprehensive but amplify those voices and celebrate what they were doing and inspire other people to build on this. >> host: from your book "where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation" published in 2010 the history of being spectacularly right as a shadow history lurking behind it, much larger history of being spectacularly wrong again and again and not just wrong but messy. error often creates a past of having -- leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. being right? in place. being wrong forces you to explore. >> guest: there's an interesting study number of years ago bout scientific papers by scientists who had made significant breakthroughs at some point in their career and what they're publishing pattern was over the course of the career. they compared that to scientists who ended up not having real breakthroughs the publish the law but didn't really change, didn't have a disruptive idea. what they found was you can judge this by looking at the citations of each paper and how many times each paper was cited by other papers because all this stuff is online now and archived and what they found was the innovators, the ones who had profound new ideas had this interesting pattern where they have a lot more failed papers and published them, far more volume to their work and a huge number of those papers never went anywhere and every now and then there would be one that was an incredible breakouts, most of the time starting out, a short little groundouts whereas the non innovative thinkers who hadn't had the real disruptive idea were just hitting singles and were much more consistent, they were not swinging for defense. the argument is to really be successful in a new way to open the new possibility in your field whether it is science or some other field you have to have this failure and error. that is what makes me see in silicon valley that there is a tremendous willingness, almost embrace failure. if you are an entrepreneur and have not had one fails startup people will get you strangely. you are supposed to have tried it and missed because that means you're taking risks. venture capitalism is predicated than 90% of investments will be failures and the huge successes. one of the things governments have to be better at, i talk about it a little bit in "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age," you have to have a sense of experimentation. when you experiment you get things wrong, go backwards or go down false leads and you built up the acceptance of failure as part of the problem. >> host: in "where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation" you have seven ways of innovating. you call them adjacent possible liquid networks, serendipity, error, expectation and platforms. if we could look at the last two what is expectation? >> guest: thank you for not making me remember all seven of them. expectation is a very profound concept with a very awkward word. it is claimed by the late evolutionary theorist stephen jay gould many years ago and they were talking in the context of evolution, a word that i should think is brilliantly applicable to innovation in technology and science and many fields and the idea is this -- in evolution there are many cases where a feature or 8 freight that evolve for one particular purpose turns out serendipitously to be good at something else when something in the environment changes. fetters we think evolve for originally for thermal regulation to keep their owners warm. some creatures that evolve these fetters decided to adopt a new life sign of flying and the ones with the others were better at it than of the ones that didn't have fenders and at that point of aleutians starts to sculpt feathers to make a more aerodynamic. we can see this in modern birds with perfectly symmetrical fedders so they are still just keeping them warm and flying birds have a symmetrical feathers which give them better aerodynamics. kind of shaping it affect after the change. the idea is a trait designed for one thing gets adapted to something else. in technology, in the history of the creative arts in any field where people are trying to be inventive and imaginative the practice of taking an idea from one place and moving it over and applying it in a new context is incredibly powerful. there's a great story knocked in "where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation," it came to me afterwards, from apple, the most innovative company in the world right now, when apple was trying to figure out what to do with its stores in early days when they were starting to plan their retail stores, this was a very controversial thing, apple will not be able -- this will be a total disaster, apple didn't want to just study its direct competitors. the normal way to do is open a consumer electronics store and go and study other consumer electronics stores. i will look at radio shack and best buy. they wanted to reinvent what it meant to be a consumer electronics store. what is a space where consumers feel they're having an amazing experience where they just loved it? they went and studied five star hotels and made their employees go through the training program and what they came out was what people love is the concierge and whatever the issue is the concierge will figure it out. i want to take a hot air balloon over the city, can make that happen. here is the expectation. what would a high end hotel concierge be in the consumer electronics store? that became the genius bar, has been putting a new context and slightly changed around and the rest is history. apples stores are the most profitable retail environment on the planet. it was that kind of -- the cliche is thinking outside the box that is not just outside the box. go to some other discipline and look at what is going on in that field and see how you can trigger a new association in your head that makes you approach the problem in a new way. >> host: platform. >> guest: this is a perfect connector to future perfect. the way in which the books are deeply connected to each other. one thing we have seen with technology platforms, the internet, the web, and things like facebook and twitter is they have the extraordinary ability when they are done right to allow for all sorts of innovation on top of that platform, but the creators never dreamed of. you create your platform and say i will set up a service this way but then you open it up to other people who can build on top of that platform and what they do is if you set up the system right, turning your tool which you felt would be used in this way they discover these are the uses that were not part of your game plan. that is one of the ways in which a platform nobody owns like the internet for the web which is collectively owned by all of us can be a great driver of private-sector innovation because the platform is open. any company can build something on it and improvise and there are a couple good examples. one example is the way twitter was used by the protest movements like occupy wall street and the arabs spring. occupy wall street began as a hash tag on twitter. that is a little symbols and whatever it is, superbowl work occupy wall street and presidential debate so everyone can follow and see what is going on. occupy wall street was nothing but a hashed tag for three or four months. only later did people say we should actually occupy wall street. the catch tax started with the first thing that was successful and they go to downtown manhattan and camped out in the square but what we love about this is if you could go back in time and talk to the guys who are inventing twitter and say to them in the future your creation, your platform you are building will be used to organize protests all-around world by hatch tags, they would have said what is a hash tag? they were not part of their platform. it was something users started to add. they didn't have any vision of political protests or even a vision of hash tags. that came from people using twitter in that way. when we create platforms that allow this creativity from ordinary people you see this great, rage ecosystem of discovery and invention that happen this. that is why i am optimistic about "future perfect: the case of progress in a networked age" because the government can create platforms and encourage ordinary people -- this is true in terms of local communities where the local government sets of the platform where anyone can report a pothole or some need in their neighborhood or a problem or an opportunity that they see and because the technology allows so much more of these ways to get information to the city, the city can be much more adaptive and resilience and innovative in the way it is instead of that bureaucratic nightmare so many governments are you can actually have the government platform that is open and inventive and creative. >> host: this is booktv's "in depth". we invite an offer to talk about his or her body of work and this month we are pleased to have bestselling author steven johnson. here is a list of his books. beginning in 1999 a technology transforms the way we create and communicate". "emergence: the connected lives of