V
Exploring the expectations and implications for version 2.0 of the Net’s new gated communities.
I receNtLY Wrote a book about the future of the Internet. The book’s thesis is that the mainstream computing environment we’ve experienced for the past 30-plus years— dating from the introduction of the first mainstream personal computer, the Apple II, in 1977—is an anomaly. The basic building blocks of modern IT are PCs that anyone can reprogram, connected to an Internet that unquestioningly routes bits between two arbitrary points. This has led to a generative revolution where novel and disruptive technologies have come from obscure backwaters—and conquered. While incumbents bet on (or were) gated-com-munity networks like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL, or makers of “smart appliances” such as dedicated word processors and video-game consoles, dark-horse candidates like the Internet and the PC emerged unexpectedly and triumphed, helped along by commercial forces that belatedly hopped on their bandwagons.
So why anomalous? Technologies that allow—indeed, depend on—con-
tributions from anywhere and trust of unknown contributors at first thrive in elite communities where people have the technical astuteness to know how to manage them and the ethos of tinkering and mutual assistance. As the platforms’ popularity increases and they enter the mainstream, greater numbers and a decline in the average user’s skill set make them increasingly worth subverting. For example, spam is more profitable when there are hundreds of millions of recipients instead
of thousands, and worms and Trojans have that much more personal data to mine or processors to hijack when over one billion PCs are in use. 1
One approach to the problem is to try to double-click our way out of it: to subscribe to antivirus software that tries to stop harmful code from running on our machines. Such Patriot missile-style defense aspires to keep bad code as a mere nuisance, but it depends on 100% accuracy and a willingness by users to defer to the recommendations of their antivirus packages—difficult when there are plenty of false positives.
Another approach is to eliminate or qualify the generative character of our technology. Apple’s iPhone was introduced in 2007, and its first version, like its near-twin iPod, allowed no outside code at all. As the book went to press in October 2007, Apple, Inc., provided perfect bookends for the trajectory of the consumer information technology ecosystem: “Rather than a platform that invites innovation, the iPhone comes preprogrammed. You are not allowed to add programs to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you.
References:
Archives