Lippman's opening keynote was a triumph. For forward thinkers with ambition, he opened new avenues of thought. But for the less adventurous, the implications of disruptive technology, as he sees it, may be a worrisome prospect for those unable to read the market and give empowered customers what they want.
The long-held convention that technology drives change was summarily overturned by Lippman, and the principle that 'society' is now central to collective democratic institutional and industry disruption was strongly argued.
He reminded Comms Vision delegates that 'people from MIT never get it wrong', so his assessment of deeply rooted social institutions being challenged by everyday Internet users should not be seen as being ballooned out of all proportion. It is a major extension of power into the hands of individuals.
Technologists aren't anywhere near the real drivers of change, he suggested. The place to look for the next big disruption is among the people who use technology, not the innovators.
This point matters. The implications are that end users will ultimately call the shots and resellers must peg their strategies to the incremental demands of this power shift to remain relevant.
Change there must be, and its significance was made clear by Lippman who offered delegates an opportunity to re-imagine tomorrow's world through the MIT lens.
"Look at what's happening with disruptive technology," he said. "It's not technology driven, but pushed by societal factors. The demands on technology are what society needs and wants.
"Today's disruptions such as Uber, AirBnB, Bitcoin and Kickstarter are not based on technological invention, but they challenge deeply rooted social institutions by transforming heavyweight social practices into massless and weightless viral phenomena.
"Viral systems are grassroots ideas that start small, scale and gain value in scaling. They can be a programme, a hardware design, a communications system or means of social interaction."
Lippman noted that the spirit of disruption goes hand in hand with the idea of faith in numbers. "The fundamental change is the Internet," he added. "The Internet was anonymous 20 years ago, now our true identities are online and everyone knows who you are. The world has turned upside down, and this disruption strikes deep at the heart of social institutions."
The real need is to understand the technical and social drivers that cause change in the way we do things, he pointed out. "This is more than bandwidth, it's where those bits go and how we use them to overturn deeply rooted institutions and replace them with massless, scalable and agile Internet institutions," he said.
Slow transformative processes are becoming viral, noted Lippman. He highlighted the way we lend items to friends - people who over time we get to know and trust. But our identities on the Internet have built a level of trust in people we haven't met directly. "What was a slow social process in knowing people is now fast, weightless and explosive. That's why Uber allows strangers into cars," he added.
"Ironically, most disrupters are not based on any great technical invention. Instead, they are a combination of societal readiness and rapid growth."
A revolution takes more than a motivated populace or a good idea, it also depends on the entrenched losing the will to lead, explained Lippman.
"In recent political terms, Egypt and Libya lost the will, Iran did not. Industries are no different," he said. "When they face a challenge and their urge is to fight it, then they have lost the will to lead, but if they go one better than the challenger they have a chance."
To underline his point Lippman cited the taxi industry and questioned whether it had lost the will to lead. When faced with an assault the first instinct is to fight, but the proper reaction is to beat and subsume the threat with a cool rather than a hot head, calculating how to lead with a winning combat strategy. Lippman also cited the finance industry as 'teetering on the edge', ripe for disruption.
"We live in an era that has disruptions that strike at institutions by people with no fear," he added. "This isn't necessarily about a change in technology, it's more an evolution of society. That's what's going to change communications. It's about attitude."
For example, computer programming has been traditionally slow and controlled by 'geeks', but this could become part of human life with 'viral programming made easy' and available to everyone. Bitcoin is viral money based on a fully distributed system. There is no central control, noted Lippman.
"Bitcoin reflects a current social sentiment that puts more trust in distributed systems than in centralised ones," he added. "It is based on an algorithm executed by many and owned by none, validated by five years of unbroken operation and over $1.3bn in (presumed) value stored in it. More importantly, its irrevocable, time-stamped ledger is a public record that has many potential non-financial uses.
"Bitcoin is the extreme of a viral system. It's not about money, it's about proving the system works and the distribution of trust."
Lippman studies viral systems through invention, sometimes of a technology, sometimes of an idea. "We validate this often through deployment," he commented. "One way to approach the problem is by considering technical thresholds that open new doors. Teleconferencing, for example, never caught on the way it was envisioned, but when it moved to portable always-connected devices, it became FaceTime."
About Andy Lippman
Andrew Lippman has a more than 35-year history at MIT. His work at the Media Lab has ranged from wearable computers to global digital television. Currently, he heads the Lab's Viral Communications research group, which examines scalable, real-time networks whose capacity increases with the number of members. This new approach to telephony transfers 'mainframe communications' technology to distributed, personally defined, cooperative communicators. In addition, he co-directs MIT's interdisciplinary Communications Futures programme.