It’s a bubble all right. Except it bursting will be the result as expected. What we should do is try to first deflate it carefully, and then try to prevent it from just going boom.
Bubbles are not some unexpected crisis, they are basically a system created by people with a lot of power to suck the power others possess to themselves, to have even more power.
One can even call the British empire becoming less official and other colonial ventures drying up as a sequence of bubbles. Notably the European monarchs were not at a loss from it all.
The dotcom bubble sucked this way a lot of money in unclear directions (hedge funds are a thing, to launder such events), then somehow Facebook and Google and Amazon happen, all not very sophisticated things, but with a lot of convenient financing and publicity.
By the way, it’s interesting that early concepts of NLS and Xanadu as things similar to the Web all didn’t have the ditches requiring a bridge with tolls, speaking metaphorically, that the Web requires, and these big companies occurred as bridges over these ditches exactly. Like - when you have two-sided links, you don’t need them. Not only many small places link to one popular place, but also the one popular place links to many small places. This, of course, also requires the system to be message-oriented, not connection-oriented. Otherwise why wouldn’t the big place censor out reverse links. Like Usenet.
This would, of course, require globally identifiable objects and versioning, with a tree of versions, so that there could be plenty of versions of the same webpage. (I’ve always felt Torvalds is sincere when he says Git is his main contribution to humanity as a programmer.)
And links would have to be version-dependent. And links would have to be not part of objects, but associated objects themselves. This way you can have object directories, or fan-in objects (objects A, B and C combine into the object D, or maybe D follows from A, B, and C as a logical statement), or fan-out objects (there’s object A, for which there are comments or subscripts B, C and D at some corresponding marks in the A structured text). Or, well, normal links referring to two objects (the exact location, again, of what part of a document is a link is contained in the link object).
This is a bit similar to voting systems, where ranked choice and ability to give a negative vote can change a lot. And this also encourages wide participation.
I just have that feeling that we as a humanity are led on a path of prepared bubbles enriching very specific people creating them and firmly knowing when and how they burst. When these people collect enough power, they might start changing the world in a direction we won’t like at all.
It’s a bubble all right. Except it bursting will be the result as expected. What we should do is try to first deflate it carefully, and then try to prevent it from just going boom.
Bubbles are not some unexpected crisis, they are basically a system created by people with a lot of power to suck the power others possess to themselves, to have even more power.
One can even call the British empire becoming less official and other colonial ventures drying up as a sequence of bubbles. Notably the European monarchs were not at a loss from it all.
The dotcom bubble sucked this way a lot of money in unclear directions (hedge funds are a thing, to launder such events), then somehow Facebook and Google and Amazon happen, all not very sophisticated things, but with a lot of convenient financing and publicity.
By the way, it’s interesting that early concepts of NLS and Xanadu as things similar to the Web all didn’t have the ditches requiring a bridge with tolls, speaking metaphorically, that the Web requires, and these big companies occurred as bridges over these ditches exactly. Like - when you have two-sided links, you don’t need them. Not only many small places link to one popular place, but also the one popular place links to many small places. This, of course, also requires the system to be message-oriented, not connection-oriented. Otherwise why wouldn’t the big place censor out reverse links. Like Usenet.
This would, of course, require globally identifiable objects and versioning, with a tree of versions, so that there could be plenty of versions of the same webpage. (I’ve always felt Torvalds is sincere when he says Git is his main contribution to humanity as a programmer.)
And links would have to be version-dependent. And links would have to be not part of objects, but associated objects themselves. This way you can have object directories, or fan-in objects (objects A, B and C combine into the object D, or maybe D follows from A, B, and C as a logical statement), or fan-out objects (there’s object A, for which there are comments or subscripts B, C and D at some corresponding marks in the A structured text). Or, well, normal links referring to two objects (the exact location, again, of what part of a document is a link is contained in the link object).
This is a bit similar to voting systems, where ranked choice and ability to give a negative vote can change a lot. And this also encourages wide participation.
I just have that feeling that we as a humanity are led on a path of prepared bubbles enriching very specific people creating them and firmly knowing when and how they burst. When these people collect enough power, they might start changing the world in a direction we won’t like at all.
OK, dreaming again.