flynn23 wrote: The net has fallen from the great communication of humanity to basically a means to induce consumerism. Hell, there are several organizations who owe their entire valuations to the fact that you can monetize the interaction of people. That's fucking insane. And certainly not what we thought would be the best and brightest uses of this system when we were pushing its deployment.
The internet is just the latest instance of a general, time-honored pattern: Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.
Consider VISA: It's not so crazy to think of Visa -- "the corporation whose product is coordination" -- as a model for how these networked organizations of the future could be managed. As Dee Hock says, "Inherent in Visa is the archetype of the organization of the 21st century."
Or the bookstore: The old-fashioned bookstore browser who picks and pokes and doesn't care about the critics or Oprah or the bestseller charts may wind up on the endangered species list.
Speaking of books, here's Neal Stephenson: One of the things I wanted to talk about in "Cryptonomicon" was the history of computing and its relationship to society. I was talking to Stephen Horst, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan, and he mentioned that Newton for the last 30 years of his life did very little in the way of science as we normally think of it. His job was to run the Royal Mint at the Tower of London. I'd been thinking a lot about gold and money, which were themes in "Cryptonomicon." At the same time, I read a book by George Dyson called "Darwin Among the Machines," in which he talks about the deep history of computing and about Leibniz and the work he did on computers. It wasn't just some silly adding machine or slide rule. Leibniz actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a machine that could carry out logical operations on bits. He knew about binary arithmetic. I found that quite startling. Up till then I hadn't been that well informed about the history of logic and computing. I hadn't been aware that anyone was thinking about those things so far in the past. I thought it all started with [Alan] Turing. So, I had computers in the 17th century. There's this story of money and gold in the same era, and to top it all off Newton and Leibniz had this bitter rivalry. I decided right away that I was going to have to write a book about that.
If Lanier's book doesn't resonate, you might reconsider David Golumbia's book from last year: This book is not about computers. It is instead about a set of widespread contemporary beliefs about computers -- beliefs that can be hard to see as such because of their ubiquity and because of the power of computers themselves. More specifically, it is about the methods computers use to operate, methods referred to generally as computation. I am convinced that from the perspective of the individual, and maybe even from the perspective of informal social groups, the empowering effects of computerization appear (and may even be) largely salutary. But from the perspective of institutions, computerization has effects that we as citizens and individuals may find far more troubling. Here, computationalism often serves the ends of entrenched power despite being framed in terms of distributed power and democratic participation. How do we guarantee that computers and other cultural products are not so pleasurable that they discourage us from engaging in absolutely necessary forms of social interaction? I see the current emphasis on the "social web" as not so much an account of a real phenomenon as it is a reaction to what we all know inside -- that computers are pulling us away from face-to-face social interactions and in so doing removing something critical from our lived experience.
RE: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto | 
