Annotated Links to the Future
Talking to Jeff this morning made me realize I probably should have said more about yesterday's Links to the Future entry. He objects to the hype surrounding Web 2.0, and I can't say I blame him.
In the two links, my aim was to present two visions of the future,
one largely
pessimistic, and one largely optimistic.
Yet, in each, there are seeds of the other, and in a turn that would
make Laozi nod in
appreciation, there is pessimism in the optimism (viz. Jeff's
grumbling about XML breads and circuses; youtube, a darling of Web 2.0
evangelists, limiting users to viewing videos of people's cats through
their proprietary flash app; DRM
everywhere), as well as optimism in the pessimism (diminishing reliance on
industrialized food, increasing neighborliness
, greener
environs, better local economic opportunities).
Posting these links was not a breathless endorsement of either. XML won't realize utopia, and society won't come crashing down in some petroclysm. Rather, the potential of so-called Web 2.0 technologies may help to bolster a global society built on a post-petroleum economy. I imagine a world where, thanks to some of the information processing power granted by nearly-universal, open information architectures and high efficiency networks, location of self becomes less relevant. Wasteful office buildings and commutes curtailed, the peak oil tail lengthens, creating more time to develop replacements of diminishing petroleum-derived materials and processes.
And if the whole world turned into a sentient computing system, a sort of global Chinese Room, that'd be kind of cool too.