It's As If You Kneel To Plant

Web 2.0 Ideas Have A Chirpy, Cheerful Rhetoric To Them, But I Think They Consistently Express A Profound Pessimism About Humans, Human Nature And The Human Future.

In History, In Most Cultures, And At Most Points In Time, If You Want To Find The Most Advanced Technologies, You Can Look Principally In Two Places. One Is Weapons And The Other Is Musical Instruments. My Hypothesis Is That Instruments Are Usually Ahead Of Weapons. In Fact, I Think You Can Find Many Examples Of Instruments Being Predecessors Of Weapons And Very Few In The Reverse.

You Have To Be Somebody Before You Can Share Yourself.

It's Possible, Without Taking Sides Or Playing The Statesman Game, To Reduce Destruction Simply By Reducing The Development Of Technology Of Destruction.

Individual Web Pages As They First Appeared In The Early 1990s Had The Flavour Of Person-hood. Myspace Preserved Some Of That Flavour, Though A Process Of Regularized Formatting Had Begun. Facebook Went Further, Organizing People Into Multiple-choice Identities While Wikipedia Seeks To Erase Point Of View Entirely. If A Church Or Government Were Doing These Things, It Would Feel Authoritarian, But When Technologists Are The Culprits, We Seem Hip, Fresh, And Inventive. People Accept Ideas Presented In Technological Form That Would Be Abhorrent In Any Other Forms