tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17469573.post115300948418784574..comments2023-08-08T09:53:14.113-02:00Comments on Platform Wars: TCP/IP vs. the Dollar (continued)Composinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01739889615635395138noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17469573.post-1153026700783471482006-07-16T03:11:00.000-02:002006-07-16T03:11:00.000-02:00Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the news of the da...Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the news of the day, and I seem to be feeling that way often lately.<BR/><BR/>Micheal Shaw at his blog Bag News Notes http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/<BR/>wrote in re the current escalation of war in the Middle East:<BR/><BR/>"What I can't imagine is the kind of humanitarian technology necessary to keep pace with the radically lower threshold for intense warfare."<BR/><BR/>Truth be told I can't wrap my head around that kind of "humanitarian technology" either, but feel a great sense of urgency to ramp-up my imagination!<BR/><BR/>The August issue of "Harpers" came in the mail today. Skimming the articles there's one about peak oil, "Imagine There's No Oil: Scenes from a liberal apocalypse" by Bryant Urstadt. The article is about Urstadt attending the Second U.S. Conference on "Peak Oil." Urstadt ends the piece with a fellow there asking him if he'd bought any gold yet. <BR/><BR/>This week I had two teenaged relatives visiting. MySpace doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but it was fun to watch the kids engage there. And fun to hear their perspectives about the meaning of MySpace friends, a subject not entirely settled in their minds, but obviously important.<BR/><BR/>So I read that bit about gold in Urstadt's essay. Chances are really good I'll never have enough money to stash some gold away, but it struck me that a network of friends would be a heck of a lot more useful than gold.<BR/><BR/>Not really attracted to Shaw's term "humanitarian technology" but it has the advantage of being a neat opposition to the instruments of war. Ross Mayfield's post on Markets as Social is really great, a pleasure to see "trust" center stage. WMD indeed quicken the mind, however solutions hardly seem technological. The underlying issues revolve around trust and the lack there of. Your point: "[M]oney and IP are rival protocols in rival networks which are means to the same end : that of articulating human labour to create more wealth for humanity." is so important. The point helps me to understand just how important TCP/IP technology is. (Alas, listening to Alaska senator Ted Stevens discussing; "The Internet is a series of Tubes"--YouTube has a number of videos which make his statements easy to listen to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<BR/>EtOoQFa5ug8&mode=related&search= I feel sympathy his uneasy grasp of the subject of the Internet.) <BR/><BR/>"Behind all the familiar phrases like "peer production" and "attention economy" and "amateur journalism" is the basic fact : people are being motivated to produce stuff by something other than money."<BR/><BR/>Yep, the radical nature of your point is beginning to sink in.<BR/><BR/>I'm horrified by John Robb's Global Guerrillas "Networked tribes, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence." I certainly take his analysis seriously about the dangers, but I'm not very enthusiastic about his ideas for countermeasures. In any case political and economic motives using the protocol of TCP/IP aren't always benign; perhaps no more or less so than for using the protocol of money. Perversions from the goal of "articulating human labour to create more wealth for humanity" are probably inevitable. <BR/><BR/>What's so important about your posts is the clarity about how really radical TCP/IP technology is. My success using money to create wealth hasn't been much, what that bodes for my using TCP/IP technology isn't very clear. On one hand I'm pessimistic, but on the other, and I dare say my dominant hand, I'm so very optimistic. This revolution is as close as I have come to imagining a "humanitarian technology."John Powershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com