Polymath who revels in a world without limits
The largest network for radiation data in the world started with a simple personal question: after the Fukushima earthquake, Joichi Ito wanted to know whether it would be safe for his family in their house in Japan.
At the time, a few days after the quake, the Japanese government wasn't releasing radiation data.
Most people would complain about the government's irresponsibility and maybe take their families on a faraway vacation. Ito got on the internet instead. No Geiger counters were available for sale. So he got in touch with a guy who made Geiger counters for Three Mile Island, a hardware hacker, and two Japanese professors working with sensors and radio isotopes.
Working together with other people from the internet and with on-the-ground volunteers, he soon found a way to take mobile radiation measurements with wireless-GPS-enabled Geiger counters.
Now, Safecast has over a million points of data. They've got institutional support. They've got non-profit status.
Ito, who remains an adviser to Safecast, is not your typical non-profit starter. Or even your typical anyone. At one point or another, Ito's been an angel investor, activist, Hollywood producer, CEO, photographer, failed entrepreneur, successful entrepreneur, blogger, design teacher, journalist, disc jockey, scuba diving instructor and more.
In his latest job as director of the famed MIT Media Lab, known for its innovative technology that brought the world things like the digital ink on your Kindle, Ito revels in the atypical. 'We encourage everyone to always do something no one else is doing,' he said of the lab. 'When everyone else starts to do it, we stop doing it.'
At MIT, he is a college dropout speaking to a roomful of PhDs and PhDs-to-be, but Ito does not need academic qualifications to hold his own. What makes him special is the connections he brings to the lab: the same way he could pull together all kinds of people to form Safecast.
On a whirlwind tour of the world, he stopped in Hong Kong last week. The lab is trying to foster connections with innovative Chinese companies as well.
If you would call Ito successful, as many would, then his is a 21st century sort of success.
To Ito, the world is divided into two phases. There's Before Internet (which he dubs BI), when the world and its information was controlled by large institutions. It was hard to find like-minded people. Couchsurfing took place by letter.
And then there's After Internet, where everything is decentralised and connected. And only when people can share their ideas can real progress happen.
This was the rationale behind Creative Commons, whose board he joined a year after it started. Up until last year, he was its pro bono CEO for two years. Creative Commons provides a form of licensing that allows individuals to give up some of the copyright to their work, making it easier to share creative work.
Three years ago, Ito helped launch Creative Commons in Hong Kong. Since then, 400,000 creative works in Hong Kong have gone under CCHK licensing. Ito worked with Pindar Wong, a Hong Kong native who is current head of the Asia and Pacific Internet Association and, like Ito, has been around on the internet for a long time.
Both Ito and Wong are part of a wave of people in the cyber age who think technology has transformed the way society works and will continue to do so.
'It's important now to be different,' said Ito. 'In the past, most of the world was normal - they watched the same TV, listened to the same music, studied the same things. But now I think most of the world is weird.'
By 'weird', he means different: the internet makes it very easy to find special interest groups.
'It's very difficult to be lonely on the internet. You find that there's always someone out there.' For Wong, those someones are an as yet untapped market.
But you have to be fast. 'Instead of working on something for years and years,' Ito says, come up with a minimally functional product: a model that is good enough to work with as you adapt and change. For him, the problem with big companies - even creative giant Apple - is that they move too slowly, are too risk averse and unwilling to fail.
As a child, Ito was trying to find the boundaries for himself as a Japanese kid growing up in Detroit, in a school where half the kids had parents laid off from American auto companies because the Japanese ones were rising so quickly.
Later, he dropped out of college twice (Tufts and University of Chicago) because he didn't feel what he was learning was practical. Whatever technophobes may say, to Ito, the internet is about real connections.
'The internet community is humble,' he said. 'The big guys would like to control how you use the product. But [the internet community] wants you to take something and make it bigger than what it is, to do something you couldn't do before.'
No one, after all, thought Twitter would play such a key role in social movements across the world.
In this age of cyber-connectivity, Ito is a perfect example of someone who is larger than life simply because he is not just a single point in space. He is a web of seemingly disparate pieces that work together.
