The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It » Introduction - About

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oD Digest - Future of the Internet Annotation

18 members,11 bookmarks

The group annotation of JZ's new book. This is the Digest, rather than opinion, group Instructions and guidelines on use here: http://message.diigo.com/message/56823?page_num=0#6
oD Opinion - Future of the Internet Annotation

17 members,5 bookmarks

This is the opinion group for the annotation of JZ's book

Instructions and guidelines on use here:http://message.diigo.com/message/56823?page_num=0#6

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Saved by 10 people (1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-04-27

Alexjones on 2008-10-02 - Tags introduction , book , online , futurology
Peter on 2008-09-15 - Tags no_tag
Wildcat2030 on 2008-09-14 - Tags no_tag
Tomislavmedak on 2008-05-11 - Tags no_tag
Bluemukaki on 2008-04-30 - Tags internet , iPhone , Apple II

Public Comment

on 2008-09-15 by peter

There is one thing that this experiment demonstrates: as users of the Internet, we cannot escape from being victims of multiple notions of reality and best practices. To this day we may, for example, all more or less agree on Adobe's Acrobat PDF format for "codex transfer" among ourselves, but even when that product was a baby (almost 20 years ago, and then known as "Carousel"), we were victimized by the bugs in the product and the format battles with its competitors. Adobe has won the battle and we are now victims of their hegemony, needing to upgrade for no reason at all. And today, we are spending less time actually getting work done and more time debating what platform will do a better job. Here, on the right I have "Comments Overview" from WordPress's CommentPress, and on the left I have Diigo's window. I could use deli.cio.us as well, to complicate things even further. I am drowning in choices, and there is no product that will merge the two for me.

on 2008-10-06 by peter

One might answer this by arguing that the competitors always eventually attrite to a single standard, as in the case of Acrobat, for which there was really no contest from the beginning (in 1992-93, Farallon's Replica and No Hands' Common Ground never left the starting post). But once there is an imposed standard, we are accosted with the tyranny of one product. Acrobat forces us to upgrade (are we now in Version 10.0?), despite the fact that virtually 100% of the documents created even today in Acrobat use only its most rudimentary features of text-and-image positioning which were present in its very earliest versions. I would say the product reached full maturity at about Version 3.0 (about 1996), and any upgrades from that point on only served as an income-stream generator for Adobe. The problem is that we are all forced to upgrade to the next version, which has a larger and larger footprint and is more and more sluggish. You could run Acrobat 3.0 on a computer running at 33 MHz and 32 MB of RAM. You couldn't think of running Acrobat 10.0 on that machine. The aggregate tyranny of the many products stuck in this revenue loop is what creates the truckloads of computers bound for the landfills, in spite of the fact that the document and web experience you are reading right now is fairly simple text that could be read on some very old computers.

Public Sticky notes

pushing the industry to a new level of competition in ways to connect us to each other and to the Web.

Highlighted by peter

to the Web.

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of its use.

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very fast.

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Though these two inventions—iPhone and Apple II—were launched by the same man, the revolutions that they inaugurated are radically different.

Highlighted by peter

For the technology that each inaugurated is radically different. The Apple II was quintessentially generative technology.

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computer crashes

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The iPhone is the opposite. It is sterile. Rather than a platform that invites innovation, the iPhone comes preprogrammed. You are not allowed to add programs to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you

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permission

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give up that freedom.

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Viruses, spam, identity theft, crashes: all of these were the consequences of a certain freedom built into the generative PC. As these problems grow worse, for many the promise of security is enough reason to give up that freedom.

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network of control

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But the future unfolding right now is very different from this past. The future is not one of generative PCs attached to a generative network. It is instead one of sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.

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things

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discover

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heartbeat

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exported

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groups with shared norms and a sense of public purpose

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or private