It's all done with words
I'm home again. Maybe I never realised how much I value having a place to call home home until I spend a week travelling away from it. The conference is over and the flight home was messy, but that can wait until tomorrow. This post has been coming for more than a day, but still retains any sense of logical order only very barely. I need more practice.
Yesterday morning we had a presentation by Joi Ito entitled "The Sharing Economy". He seems to do research into the cultural phenomenon on the Internet that translates to social change and spoke passionately about file sharing, the Republican party, wikipedia, blogging, fansubbing and creative commons. I had to wince when he played The Narutrix, though everyone loved it.
He had a lot of cool stuff to talk about, but the speech he gave might have been too politically charged to be appropriate to a developers' conference. Given that we're at a conference of geeks, most didn't really care and had a great time. I fell into the same category and lapped up the experience, but felt slightly awkward as well. It felt too much like a political commentary to me - the best parts of someone's blog.
Somewhere in his talk I tried to jot down a conclusion of my own from his reasoning but couldn't quite frame it correctly, so I think I'll revise until that point.
A big component of his talk emphasised the success of Wikipedia and how this model would become more prevalent through the Internet. This was the solution to content creation and management, he foresaw, where collaborative efforts expanded from merely filling the niches of fansubs and music sharing to driving demand for new anime and music that was more accessible rather than more restricted. It reduces the control a business has over its market and its product but ultimately it leaves the business slimmer and more efficient, and consumers get closer to what they want.
My thought at the time was that you couldn't erode an existing business in the way this proposes. It's ideal that business should be driven by demand as flexibly as that demand is inconsistent, but that's not the goal of existing business. Instead, modern businesses have the short-sightedness that comes from unreliable macro-economics: no matter how solid their plan for the future could be, there's always the fear that they will never withstand a real storm if they haven't returned something on their investment quickly. Since the ultimate constraint is demand and the only way to forcibly increase demand without further investment is to make a less specialised product, delivering less average satisfaction to more people, we have monopolies protecting low-grade products. What he's promoting inevitably leads to a system of micropayments, and too many modern businesses can't evolve in that direction.
Joi praised Internet justice and its effects, but I'm not convinced we can easily evolve in that direction either. Apparently the average blackout time for a vandalised Wikipedia page is 5 minutes, which is a pretty cool testimony to people's vigilance. He paused in an aside about freedom of speech to note that he did not support hate speech, but in his view, the Internet is a garden of infinite choice in which reputation and discussion (both via blogs, for example) drive popularity and success. The Internet offers a level of scrutiny that's previously unheard of, yet that's only after you've filtered out the mob induced by the numbers involved. While I see no reason not to believe you can't separate useful contribution from noise, a model of success based on rationalism invites itself to a social hierarchy based on education and literacy. I'm not trying to poke fun at the current governments of the world but I don't believe that education and literacy are the driving forces involved where modern government is concerned.
This is where I see great social effects stemming from in our time. Somehow, we've managed a foothold in a different world order, and most of the things that are important to the old world order are incompatible. The effects are systemic. Companies are struggling with changes they cannot undergo, and are reacting in bizarre and unforeseen ways. I think that among other things, this is manifested as mergers between companies of dissimilar interests, the emergence of a litigious economy and a widening gap between corporate and consumer expectations that governments are struggling to straddle.
I don't think anything revolutionary is going to happen until it's easier to make honest money from the Internet, but the advantage would surely be in the new court. If two regimes are opposed but one doesn't outlaw the other, the other may have already won. While conventional society can break your nose with one punch, that's still a crime; the Internet has the power to utterly humiliate you and it's all done with words.
And standing there, even with blood on your knuckles, you'll still feel hurt when they say that you punch like a girl.
Yesterday morning we had a presentation by Joi Ito entitled "The Sharing Economy". He seems to do research into the cultural phenomenon on the Internet that translates to social change and spoke passionately about file sharing, the Republican party, wikipedia, blogging, fansubbing and creative commons. I had to wince when he played The Narutrix, though everyone loved it.
He had a lot of cool stuff to talk about, but the speech he gave might have been too politically charged to be appropriate to a developers' conference. Given that we're at a conference of geeks, most didn't really care and had a great time. I fell into the same category and lapped up the experience, but felt slightly awkward as well. It felt too much like a political commentary to me - the best parts of someone's blog.
Somewhere in his talk I tried to jot down a conclusion of my own from his reasoning but couldn't quite frame it correctly, so I think I'll revise until that point.
A big component of his talk emphasised the success of Wikipedia and how this model would become more prevalent through the Internet. This was the solution to content creation and management, he foresaw, where collaborative efforts expanded from merely filling the niches of fansubs and music sharing to driving demand for new anime and music that was more accessible rather than more restricted. It reduces the control a business has over its market and its product but ultimately it leaves the business slimmer and more efficient, and consumers get closer to what they want.
My thought at the time was that you couldn't erode an existing business in the way this proposes. It's ideal that business should be driven by demand as flexibly as that demand is inconsistent, but that's not the goal of existing business. Instead, modern businesses have the short-sightedness that comes from unreliable macro-economics: no matter how solid their plan for the future could be, there's always the fear that they will never withstand a real storm if they haven't returned something on their investment quickly. Since the ultimate constraint is demand and the only way to forcibly increase demand without further investment is to make a less specialised product, delivering less average satisfaction to more people, we have monopolies protecting low-grade products. What he's promoting inevitably leads to a system of micropayments, and too many modern businesses can't evolve in that direction.
Joi praised Internet justice and its effects, but I'm not convinced we can easily evolve in that direction either. Apparently the average blackout time for a vandalised Wikipedia page is 5 minutes, which is a pretty cool testimony to people's vigilance. He paused in an aside about freedom of speech to note that he did not support hate speech, but in his view, the Internet is a garden of infinite choice in which reputation and discussion (both via blogs, for example) drive popularity and success. The Internet offers a level of scrutiny that's previously unheard of, yet that's only after you've filtered out the mob induced by the numbers involved. While I see no reason not to believe you can't separate useful contribution from noise, a model of success based on rationalism invites itself to a social hierarchy based on education and literacy. I'm not trying to poke fun at the current governments of the world but I don't believe that education and literacy are the driving forces involved where modern government is concerned.
This is where I see great social effects stemming from in our time. Somehow, we've managed a foothold in a different world order, and most of the things that are important to the old world order are incompatible. The effects are systemic. Companies are struggling with changes they cannot undergo, and are reacting in bizarre and unforeseen ways. I think that among other things, this is manifested as mergers between companies of dissimilar interests, the emergence of a litigious economy and a widening gap between corporate and consumer expectations that governments are struggling to straddle.
I don't think anything revolutionary is going to happen until it's easier to make honest money from the Internet, but the advantage would surely be in the new court. If two regimes are opposed but one doesn't outlaw the other, the other may have already won. While conventional society can break your nose with one punch, that's still a crime; the Internet has the power to utterly humiliate you and it's all done with words.
And standing there, even with blood on your knuckles, you'll still feel hurt when they say that you punch like a girl.