Topics
Themes
Since discovering the net in 1993, the things I’ve spent my time thinking through, working on, and writing about have varied widely.
I have been a producer, programmer, professor, designer, author, consultant, sometimes working with people who wanted to create a purely intellectual or aesthetic experience online, sometimes working with people who wanted to use the internet to sell books or batteries or banking.
While doing this work, I have always written about whatever interested me at the time: the philosophical characteristics of WAP; the change Napster portends for internet architecture; the price of information in a system with no delivery bottleneck; the approach to representation of 3D space in shoot-’em-up games; the effects of the British Empire on the use of English on the net; the particular brand of lies favored by new media marketers.
I have pursued these things with no particular goal other than clarifying for myself what it is I think. There is no grand scheme there, no central goal, no master plan.
As I have gathered these writings together and tried to organize them, however, I have been surprised to see that there are things here that organize these writings, not so much by category as by theme.
If I had to describe what I write about, it would be “Systems where vested interests lose out to innovation.”
Or maybe “Systems where having good participants produces better results than having good planners.”
I now recognize in my writings an interest in any systems undergoing an influx of new participants -- the need to avoid mandated design standards on the web; the tremendous increase in internet use outside the US; the new voice of previously mute consumers.
I find that whenever I waste time thinking about what I think should happen, it interferes with my ability to predict what’s going to happen. I do not have many illusions that ‘power to the people’ is an unalloyed good. There are obvious problems with any such system, even such basic ones as democracy and free markets.
More than once, new technologies have held out the promise of wider participation by citizens, only to be corralled by a new set of legal or economic realities, and the net, which threatens many vested interests all at once, will be no exception.
Nevertheless, despite a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ progression, we are living through a potentially enormous shift in the amount of leverage the many have over the few. It is my aim to chronicle these changes as they happen, and to provide a framework, built from observation, which aids both interpretation and prediction.