New Soft-world

I read John Perry Barlow’s “declaration of independence”, and I feel sorry for him. The poor guy, all he wants is utopia, is that too much to ask?

To be fair, at least he realises that utopia is practically impossible in the real world; this makes me think of our “where’s the line?” argument from last week.

Barlow’s “I have a dream”-esque manner of writing is nice, but also naïve. Nice, because he realises there is no hierarchy or distinction among race. Naïve because as he expressed in the previous paragraph, there is no discrimination among who “connects” so “your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us” is a nice thought but yeah, naive. With everyone having a slice, someone’s definitely going to try to monetise they’re particular brand of pizza (please bare with me and my analogies).

It’s interesting how the story of the internet has parallels even today, and I think I’ve come up with an equation of sorts:

Something cool comes along

Something cool is distributed to nerds worldwide. Those nerds with friends spread it to slightly more social people, Something cool becomes popular

Now, one of two things will happen:

a) Something cool is bought by a liberal company and distributed for free, or free-ish (known as open source or freeware).

b) Or, something cool is bought be not so liberal company and distributed not so free (known as expensive).

Kevin Kelly writes about “an emerging new economic order” or the “new economy”, and embraces this idea of option (b).

Kelly and Barlow do agree on something: the internet is not physical, almost metaphysical, and it consists of “transactions, relationships, and thought itself” as Barlow (1996) says and as Kelly expands, “the new economy has three distinguishing characteristics: It is global [and] It favors intangible things—ideas, information, and relationships.”(1999).

May I just mention the cute little similarities with these two?

Barlow: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.”

Kelly “the principles governing the world of the soft—the world of intangibles, of media, of software, and of services—will soon command the world of the hard—the world of reality, of atoms, of objects, of steel and oil, and the hard work done by the sweat of brows. Iron and lumber will obey the laws of software”

Although they agree on the internet’s concept, Kelly and Barlow have different ways to use it. Kelly likes the grandeur in an economy consisting entirely on the internet, without space or time; and in this he sees no discrimination as Barlow described, you don’t need a suit or slicked hair to buys shares from your computer at home.

Barlow, I think, is one of those people who wants to keep everything in his control and clings to his rose coloured view that the internet-Triffid cannot be controlled. Barlow’s sentiments border on childish stubbornness, he should be careful because, as Kelly writes, “those who play by the new rules will prosper, while those who ignore them will not.”

eesh, this was a long one. Sorry about that!

A moral grey-area

One thing I have learned over the last couple of weeks is that the internet was never what anyone intended it to be.

It was envisaged that the internet, or “ARPANET” at the time, would ensure survival after a nuclear attack in the Cold War (how many technological advances have there been for fear of the Russians I ask you?), and it did that.

However it soon developed into “news and personal messages” (Sterling 1993 p2), and of course this is abused to gossip and schmooze” (Although the first big mailing list was “SF LOVERS" (for those enduring science fiction fans).

The theory of the internet also had a sort of closed network, in that only the military and academic institutions could use it.

But then it gets distributed and the boundaries no longer apply like they used to, so like now the internet in most places has no boundaries, but let’s not forget China (sneaky buggers).

A question posed in the sterling reading was “Why do people want to be "on the Internet?". The answer, he thinks, is freedom “a rare example of a true, modern, functional anarchy”, and an anarchy that is (usually) not punished or subdued. It’s all in the infrastructure, any node can speak to any other node as long as they speak the same language (TCP/IP Protocol), it’s technical, not social or political (1993, p3).

I liked Sterling’s analogy that the internet is like the English language, whereby it is what you make it (1993, p3).

With everyone with a different notion of what the internet as and what it can and should be used for, there is the question I raised earlier of boundaries. What’s right and what’s wrong, or what is appropriate, is not constitutional.

My personal opinion about this whole WoW funeral ambush thing is that, yeah, these douche-bags go and kill everyone paying respects to someone who actually dies (kind weird). That’s not what I’m concerned about. In WoW you pay real money for things, like weapons and stuff, and these people were AMBUSHED and lost their weapons and stuff, so they lost actual money...

Money exists in the real world, if you lose it, you have a right to be pissed. Just saying

Refs:
Sterling, B. (1993) 'A Short History of the Internet', The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [URL: http://sodacity.net/system/files/Bruce_Sterling_A_Short_History_of_the_Internet.pdf]