Today, the primary threat by far to internet freedom is government filtering of political dissent. This has been far more effective than I ever imagined possible across a number of nations. In addition, other countries such as the US have come close to adopting very similar techniques in order to combat piracy and other vices. I believe these efforts have been misguided and dangerous.
Pinterest, circa 1600.
Lévi-Strauss writes, as quoted by John Berger:
For Renaissance artists, painting was perhaps an instrument of knowledge but it was also an instrument of possession, and we must not forget, when we are dealing with Renaissance painting, that it was only possible because of the immense fortunes which were being amassed in Florence and elsewhere, and that rich Italian merchants looked upon painters as agents, who allowed them to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world. The pictures in a Florentine palace represented a kind of microcosm in which the proprietor, thanks to his artists, had recreated within easy reach and in as real a form as possible, all those features of the world to which he was attached.
Oil Painting, as a genre, used extreme realism to communicate wealth and possession. Today, such extreme realism is accessible by anyone with an internet connection or a cheap digital camera. There’s no need to to hire expensive painters; anyone can associate with any thing.
Instead of showing off possession, sites like Pinterest allows you to show off taste.
While more egalitarian, it’s still just people posing with their associated stuff. If Berger’s argument applies to this age as well, every Like and Pin will be largely forgotten.
I never want to forget this chair.
Solving Problems The Internet Way »
The Internet works differently than most other things we’re used to. 20th century humans are accustomed to hierarchy, control and scarcity. The Internet, by contrast, is distributed open, and abundant. That difference is fundamental — it not only empowers what’s possible on the Internet (which we increasingly understand), but it also informs how we need to go about solving the Internet’s problems (this is harder).
+1. See also, emergence.
If there was one lesson I’ve learned in the last three years working for [Secretary Clinton] and being witness to significant shifts in power around the world, it’s that there is a significant shift in geopolitical power globally right now, from hierarchies, like the nation-state, to individuals and networks of individuals. This is something that’s being accelerated by increasingly powerful and ubiquitous information networks.
Alec J. Ross at Davos as reported by The New Yorker (via cacioppo)
It is interesting that this is happening in both the government and private sector levels.
(via siminoff)
(via fred-wilson)
Where is Premium Email?
Developers: please think twice before building small, niche services atop existing, entrenched, ad-supported platforms and consider creating premium versions of the functions said platforms provide. When users are spooked by successive privacy news stories, ask them how much their privacy and data is worth. Answer with your product.
For example: I’d like to see a start up set out to become the world’s best email service. For $40-$100 a year, customers would have unlimited storage, a powerful (ad free) interface, and rock solid reliability. Such a service would be combine of the best parts of Gmail and ifttt.
Users could write and share plug-ins or scripts for aggregating or filtering in-boxes. This service would also connect to other services (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instapaper, etc) so that users could email links or writing to their inbox with a specific subject line and have it processed into a post, link, or whatever. Email could become one’s own private, flexible API, handling notes, articles, actions, and other events.
Perhaps this service exists and I’m simply unaware (if so, please help me here), but this opportunity isn’t limited to email. Dropbox and SquareSpace are two great examples of companies who took a small, taken for granted component of the internet (shared storage and website) and made it absurdly easy, tailored for actual users (not just the tech adept), and charged for it. What about an RSS manager to replace a creaky Google Reader? Or a photo manager to absorb the jittery population of Flickr and grow it to everyone who would pay to protect their photos, privately? Or let’s just start with email.
Seconded.
can you imagine Warhol + Internet???
Andy Warhol, died 25 years ago (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987)
He would have loved the Internet.
We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.
We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.
By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.
Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.
Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.
Facebook’s S-1 Filing
Facebook officially asserts itself as a non-state actor.
In the future we’ll only discuss daily deal sites as a brief symptom of the gradual realization that online populations are populations unto themselves.
Perhaps. I’m not exactly sure what this means, but I’ve been thinking along the same lines recently. I think the Internet is gradually rooting out all “latent groups.” As Mancur Olson postited in his Theory of Groups and Organizations:
Only a separate and “selective” incentive will stimulate a rational individual in a latent group to act in a group-oriented way. In such circumstances group action can be obtained only through an incentive that operates, not indiscriminately, like the collective good, upon the group as a whole, but rather selectively toward the individuals in the group. The incentive must be “selective” so that those who do not join the organization working for the group’s interest, can be treated differently from those who do.
Daily deal sites are selective incentive machines. They’re really good at helping businesses find latent groups and and sell fixed inventories or goods with very low marginal costs (they’re really bad at helping businesses sell goods with significant marginal costs).
What would be nice is to devise a way to create “non-deal” incentives to draw out latent groups. Surely we can figure out more edifying ways to get these “populations unto themselves” to get together. Kickstarter is an obvious example. Meetup kind of is too. Of course, Groupon’s predecessor, The Point, was too.
FWIW, I interviewed Andrew Mason about The Point back in the day. He knows his organizational theory.
Hitler reacts to SOPA
surprisingly good
Excellent.
Congress wants to cripple the only medium that’s consistently creating jobs and growth.
The techno-libertarian utopianism that pervades Silicon Valley means that both corporations and individuals buy into the idea that they don’t need to bend anyone’s ear in Washington D.C.
The problem is, D.C. is still going to talk other people. (Notably, the entertainment industry, which has a long, effective track record of getting its legislation passed.) Together they’re going to talk about us, and we can be a part of that conversation, or not. But no matter how much we may wish that Congress wouldn’t listen to lobbyists, it’s an unrealistic expectation borne of idealism that ignores how our broken, dysfunctional government actually works. In the America of 2012, laws are written by lobbyists.
Mat Honan says SOPA And PIPA are the internet’s own damn fault and he’s right.
(via jimray)
I'm Jed Sundwall. This is my blog, which you can follow on Tumblr or via RSS. You can talk to me on Twitter.
