[IP] World of Ends
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 07:15:42 -0800
From: "Joseph C. Pistritto" <jcp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: World of Ends
X-Sender: jcp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Quite good for a short piece. I thought it was worth reading.
http://www.worldofends.com/
For IP if you want to.
-jcp-
World of Ends
What the Internet Is and
How to Stop Mistaking It
for Something Else.
by
Doc Searls and
David Weinberger
Last update: 4.28.03
There are mistakes and there are mistakes.
Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for
pets on the Web is a great way to get rich. We're not going to do that again.
Other mistakes we insist on making over and over. For example, thinking that:
* ...the Web, like television, is a way to hold eyeballs still while
advertisers spray them with messages.
* ...the Net is something that telcos and cable companies should
filter, control and otherwise "improve."
* ... it's a bad thing for users to communicate between different kinds
of instant messaging systems on the Net.
* ...the Net suffers from a lack of regulation to protect industries
that feel threatened by it.
When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake
Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing,
broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry,
and the telephone industry, to name just six.
Thanks to the enormous influence of those industries in Washington,
Repetitive Mistake Syndrome also afflicts lawmakers, regulators and even
the courts. Last year Internet radio, a promising new industry that
threatened to give listeners choices far exceeding anything on the
increasingly variety-less (and technologically stone-age) AM and FM bands,
was shot in its cradle. Guns, ammo and the occasional "Yee-Haw!" were
provided by the recording industry and the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, which embodies all the fears felt by Hollywood's alpha dinosaurs when
they lobbied the Act through Congress in 1998.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,"
<http://www.toad.com/gnu/>John Gilmore famously said. And it's true. In the
long run, Internet radio will succeed. Instant messaging systems will
interoperate. Dumb companies will get smart or die. Stupid laws will be
killed or replaced. But then, as John Maynard Keynes also famously said,
"In the long run, we're all dead."
All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It's not
hard. The Net isn't rocket science. It isn't even 6th grade science fair,
when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake
Syndrome in our lifetimes and save a few trillion dollars? worth of dumb
decisions if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of
ends. You're at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other
ends.
Sure, that?s a feel-good statement about everyone having value on the Net,
etc. But it?s also the basic rock-solid fact about the Net's technical
architecture. And the Internet?s value is founded in its technical
architecture.
Fortunately, the true nature of the Internet isn?t hard to understand. In
fact, just a fistful of statements stands between Repetitive Mistake
Syndrome and Enlightenment?
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