Sorry, this is a geek intensive post. Don’t read it – just go read a letter from Stephen Colbert if you’re disinterested.
In the lastest post on my favorite site, Dive Into Mark , Pilgrim puts alot into perspective as to the cyclical nature of standardization, cultural norms, and the world.
Back when I posted intensive geeky guides I’d allude to the Automotive Industry to put things into perpsective.
People forget that the web is so young. It’s been around since the early 1990s. The Internet has been around since the 60s, but the web is not the Internet, fucking differentiate the two already.
The Web is not:
- A quick dollar
- Stagnant
- Proprietary
- Controllable
- Not immune to The invisible hand
- Private
It will be interesting to see how the web evolves. Will it evolve like the education system has? Or will it evolve like the music industry ?
The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create
a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should
be subject to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for
us, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it
and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment
in America.
Is the Web itself inherently flawed? As the paradoxes article points out, the decentralized centralization of the web is a source of many of its problems. Any protection mechanism, for instance, the DSBL, provides a quick list of open proxies that can be used for malicious purposes.
We’re in a time of instability.
