Excellent stuff, as always from you two.
From a first quick reading, one curious (possibly) inadvertent juxtaposition in the text really jumped out at me. You quote Keynes:
"In the long run, we're all dead."And immediately follow with:
"We'd like to avoid the wait."Don't know about you, but this reads kind of like a ‘just shoot me’ suicide plea. And why is
Paul barefoot?
My one other hiccup over this piece is regarding the rallying cry you've chosen to end on:
"We have nothing to lose but our stupidity"Lovely. But without over-complicating things, I feel the need to draw a distinction in this context between ‘stupidity’ and ‘stupidness’.
Stupidity is indeed something we should hope to lose, or hope big business, the recording industry, the telcos will lose.
Stupidness, on the other hand, is a value to be treasured, protected, nurtured.
That the Net has stupidness built in to its very architecture is, as they point out, the best thing about it.
The inherent stupidness of the Net works to the benefit of humankind, in the same way Chance the Gardener’s “stupidness” works to the benefit of those around him. Sellers' character in
Being There achieves extraordinary prominence, influence, and is even capable of miracles – quite simply because he “doesn’t know any better”. Same with the Net. Napster, Google, the human genome project – none of these innovations would be possible without the quintessential stupidness of the Internet.
So. We have nothing to lose but our stupidity;
but let our stupidness know no bounds!My favourite point in the whole thing is the first of "the Internet's three virtues":
a. No one owns it.
I've been trotting round companies recently, talking to people about building a successful communications strategy for their intRAnet projects, and trying to preach a Cluetrain-inspired message to the effect that, if they want a successful intranet, and a motivated, engaged workforce - they should relinquish ownership.
As with the Internet, so with the intranet, imho.
