Category: Work & Thought

Television-Internet

Hossein Derakhshan, known as Iran’s Blogfather, warns of the ongoing cultural changes regarding the Web:

The stream, mobile applications, and moving images all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication – nodes and networks and links – toward one that is linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.

Sometimes I think maybe I’m becoming too strict as I age. Maybe this is all a natural evolution of a technology. But I can’t close my eyes to what’s happening: a loss of intellectual power and diversity. In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. So much that even Iran doesn’t take some – Instagram, for instance – serious enough to block.

We can’t trust Uber

New York Times: We can’t trust Uber

Not just Uber, but all the usual suspects.

Somewhere in the next couple of decades, there will be a tipping point. Scientific breakthrough in distributed systems will have to top the unassailable power, efficiency and convenience of today’s huge central service providers and gatekeepers. Why? Because no amount of regulatory oversight can prevent centralized abuse of power; this article provides just one of countless examples.

That new wave of decentralization may come through home-scaled nodes; it may come through communal pools, in a topology similar to that of the Internet of the early days. Either way, it has to come and succeed.