|
Monday, December 23, 2002
A chill wind that blows no minds 
| | Things are getting a bit testy in on the NEA (Nobody owns it, Everybody Can use it, Anybody can improve it) debate we've been having. Or at least it looks that way, judging from the latest by AKMA and Eric Norlin. |
| | When Eric prods us to get comfortable with digital identity — "DigID" — to accept the inevitable commercial interest in DigID, to abandon our communal dwellings on Mars and get down to Earth where people know that "the true beauty of the internet is in the pornography, the capitalism, the conflict and dark corners of the human soul," I can't simply appreciate the verve of his presentation and nod politely. |
| | I'm an unapologetic, unreconstructed capitalist. Sorry, its true. I have very few rock-solid moral beliefs (ask my wife, it worries her), but this is one of them. Capitalism -- for all of its faults-- at base, is a damn fine thing. Is it evolving? yes. Does it cause injustices? sure. Bottom Line: I do think that capitalism aligns with something fundamentally sound that's at the core of humans. |
| | I think things went a bit south with this paragraph, which I posted on the 16th under the subhead "Mars is Ready. Commece habitation": |
| | About making money. Ever asked yourself what the business model of rocks is? Of dirt? Of trees? Of rotted plants? Of reproductive urges? Last I looked the building, concrete, lumber, oil and porn businesses were doing pretty well. The difference with the Net is: its resources are infinite. They don't need to be renewed, because they're not scarce. You mine and harvest them by processes like duplication. Take all you want; just don't buy the illusion that you "own" any of it. You don't, any more than you own the air you breathe or the jillion-ton wedge of rock and lava between your yard and the core of the Earth. Deep down, it's a commie kinda place. Deal with it. |
| | The "commie kind of place" line was a red herring that worked a bit too well. |
| | Here's a corollary to that last paragraph: markets are deeply commercial places. Business is commercial. Deal with that, too. |
| | There is an ecosystem at work here: one in which the sub-commercial nature of the Net supports commercial activity — markets and all the creatures who live there — in the same way gravity and geology support agriculture, transportation and commercial buildings. |
| | The difference between the Earth and the Net is that the Net isn't complete. It has no identity services yet. (Nor, by the way, much in the way of directory, security, print, management and a host of other services that LANs have had for fifteen years.) What I've been saying for awhile on this (but not clearly enough, I guess) is that these services cannot come only from one side or the other of the public/commercial divide. They have to fundamentally empower customers and the vendors who meet their needs. |
| | This isn't a matter of taking sides. It's a matter of taking up the challenge of building something out that works for everybody because nobody owns it — just like all the other stuff that comprises this pile of ownerless protocols and standards we call the Net. |
| | We need something that supports commercial activity, plus lots of other stuff, such as controlling unwanted inbound mail (which is still based on really shitty identity assumpions by the senders and equally shitty acceptance mechanisms by the receivers). We're not going to get those services by proceeding exclusively from the commercial interests of sellers or from the privacy interest of customers. |
| | And getting defensive about either or both of those "sides" does nothing but put up walls on either side of which we talk only to ourselves. Once again, AND logic is what will work. Not OR. |
| | So let's get on with it. We have some serious terraforming to do. |
Tune in
| | Actually, it's life in general that stands in the way of perfect control. Music, law, whatever. Perfect control is not only unattainable, it's undesirable. |
Hey, at least blogs are booming
| | It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. "It" was the seemingly everlasting tech bust of the year 2002. Try as we might to turn the tide, there seemed little we could do. So we all went over to Jing Jing, a Palo Alto eatery that is much favoured by geeks, to talk it over.... |
| | ...Instead of Marx and Engels, we have (Dave) Winer and ("Doc") Searls. Instead of barricades and demonstrations, we have Weblogs and P2P. Instead of Manchester (home to Engels and the new industries) we have the ad-hoc architecture of the net. We had PDAs and digital cameras: we estimated maybe a teraflop and a gigapixel of processing and picture storage. We had lots of good and very spicy Szechuan-style food and just a few bottles of cold Tsing Tao beer. |
There are responses to this message:
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
