It's a book about the internet written back in 2000. It's not a technical books about coding or routing or what have you. Rather, it is a romantic meditation on how the internet changes the market and business and how the internet changes the world. In parts the language and the vision is quite beautiful. Cutting, funny, poetic, even.
"The problem, of course, is that life is anti-formulaic, anti-institutional ... Life can't be shrink-wrapped, caged, dissected, analyzed, or owned. Life is free." - Christopher locke
"Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever." -Christopher Locke
"TechnoLatin takes perfectly meaningful words and empties them ...Today we no longer make chips, circuit boards, computers, monitors, or printers. We don't even make products. Instead we make solutions, ...
Equally vague and common are platform, open, environment, and support when used as a verb. A veterinarian using TechnoLatin might say that a dog serves as a platform for sniffing, is an open environment for fleas, and that it supports barking.
This isn't language. It's camouflage" - Doc Searls
The way David Weinberg sees it, the Web is different from the internet. The web is documents, hyperlinks, and the human voice. The internet was merely okay. When the web was added to it that's when things really started to cook.
Seven years after this book was first published, I wonder to what degree their dreams and predictions have become a reality. As far as I can tell corporations are as they ever were. We just spend more time at work in front of computers.
What happened to this revolution? Does the fight continue?
2 comments:
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of work on the net these days, but a lot of fun too! (free fun, most importantly)
But just think, would you rather work on a computer or spend day after day shuffling through a card catalogue?
ldbug: True there is work and thankfully there is fun as well. I've got to say that I love the romantic speculations of some of the internet's biggest dreamers. And I wonder whether the net will end up transforming the human condition or just be another tool for maintaining the status quo.
Certainly the volumes of data I deal with are more significant, but the hours are the same and the work is pretty much the same as well.
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