The Wealth of Networks

[Jason McCullough]

A new really cool book on the internet, community, networking, copyright, shrink-wrap agreements, and a bazillion other things is out. I just finished it, and it's an quite good summary and analysis of the last ten years in these areas.

Full text (http://habitat.igc.org/wealth-of-networks/) is here. Crooked Timber symposium on it is here (http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/30/introduction-the-wealth-of-networks-seminar/). Lawrence Lessig raving about it here (http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003368.shtml).

Note: You probably need to be unemployed to do it justice; the thing is enormous.

[zabuni]

Bile rising......

First, comic sans ms. No, just no.

Two, haven't read it yet, but is it Cory Doctorow style free culture techno utopianism? I'm really getting tired of "all culture should be free".

Hmm....looking at it, seems a bit more balanced than the usual rants.

Never mind:

Perhaps fewer mediocre musicians with attractive physiques will be sold as "geniuses," and more talented musicians will be heard than otherwise would have, and will as a result be able to get paying gigs instead of waiting tables or "getting a job."

Jesus. Judgemental much?

Edit:


One concern is that open wireless networks are available for criminals to hide their tracks-the criminal uses someone else's Internet connection using their unencrypted WiFi access point, and when the authorities successfully track the Internet address back to the WiFi router, they find an innocent neighbor rather than the culprit. This concern has led to some proposals that manufacturers of WiFi routers set their defaults so that, out of the box, the router is encrypted. Given how "sticky" defaults are in technology products, this would have enormously deleterious effects on the development of open wireless networks.


However, security concerns need not support proprietary architectures and practices. On the wireless front, there is a very wide range of anonymization techniques available for criminals and terrorists who use the Internet to cover their tracks. The marginally greater difficulty that shutting off access to WiFi routers would impose on determined criminals bent on covering their tracks is unlikely to be worth the loss of an entire approach toward constructing an additional last-mile loop for local telecommunications.

Is this suggesting the use of unsecured wireless points for use in last mile telecommunications? And that mandating encryption would be a bad thing because of that? Wireless is already pisspoor in terms of encryption, and they want to make sure the default remains a total lack of security?

[bago]

Mandates/Laws are enforced at the end of the day by men with guns. Far too often people forget that when demanding lawmakers "do something".

Do you really want a man with a gun pointed at you for the crime of trying to make something you bought free in the land of "freedom"?

[bago]

Networks are what happens when you can copy across boundaries. Life is what happens when molecules learn how to copy.

An interesting parallel.

[Jason McCullough]

I don't know whether to be impressed or disturbed I can resurrect a two year-old thread.

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536) is Yochai Benkler, except short, punchy, and readable. Unless you need to make money off it or do research on it, read Clay.

This is the first thing I've read that's got me to understand what the hell MySpace is for. It's a bunch of teenagers that can't write to save their lives, right?

Wrong. It's a transaction cost-reduction system to put people with common interests and values ("the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers") in touch. And the reason it seems so damn bizarre and mundane is that you aren't the audience; their small friend network is.

The book is worth the read for how it ties together the East Germans managed to take down their dictatorship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_German_Democratic_Republic#Regime_c ollapse.2C_1989) by loose, ambigously organized social networks at the beginning of the digital era with the Belarus ice cream protests (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=7Um&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=belarus+ice+cream+protests&spell=1) at the other. Social networking tools have really done a number on top-down authoritarian networks. Yes, yes, the cool kids had officially realized this years ago, but for me it's somewhat new.

[malphigian]

Clay Shirky is probably the only writer I can think of who writes about the internet without being insufferable.

I can remember way back in the day when all the usual "internet thinker" types were talking about how awesome VRML was going to be. Shirky wrote some great articles basically saying how it was a solution in search of problem, and later talked about Quake as an example of a real 3d tool and community that pundits dismissed because it was "just a game".

More recently he's done a really good job taking the wind of the Second Life hype.

I'll check out his book, in general he seems so much more grounded than his peers.